Tag Archives: Attention

The Inattention Economy

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I need you to try to do something very hard for me. I need you to read this entire blog post. I don’t think it’s going to be hard because I’m going to use big words or highly technical terms. I don’t think it’s going to be hard because of the subject matter. It’s going to be hard because you’re going to get interrupted. In fact, I’m willing to be you got some notification before you ever finished this paragraph.

I didn’t realize just how scattered my attention was until a close friend pointed it out to me. She mentioned that I was always checking my watch for notifications. I didn’t realize it until someone that wasn’t around me all the time saw it. I stepped back and honestly asked myself why I was getting so many notifications. In the back of my mind I knew I was getting too many because when I go on a run my watch won’t stop buzzing with all the things that I don’t even bother to check. That’s when I realized my attention was beyond scattered. LinkedIn, GroupMe, even Yelp seemed to want me to pay attention to something that was ultimately unimportant.

Distracting for Dollars

If you’ve read a post about focus or watched any number of Youtube people talking about it you know that we are drowning in a sea of information. Everything has to update us all the time about what’s going on and what we should be doing. Half of the websites that I visit daily want to put notifications on my phone or desktop when they publish new stories. My son’s dentist uses a camera scanning app to check his braces alignment weekly. I like the idea but I don’t like that the app wants to remind me of scan times and updates on his status and things. It’s like they want me to check the app constantly.

That, in my mind, is the real problem with all these notifications. It’s not that the app or the service wants to let you know about something. It’s that you must check the app RIGHT NOW to see what’s going on. Don’t believe me? Use your phone to check the temperature. Open it up and navigate to your weather app. I bet you have to wade through notifications and updates and banners that are trying to grab your attention the whole time. They want your eyeballs. They need your attention. And they’re willing to do all kinds of things to make sure they get it.

LinkedIn wants to update you on a thread that you posted in because someone liked someone else’s comment. Facebook’s stupid highlight mention makes sure ALL of your friends get a notification when someone uses it in a comment. Can you seriously believe Mark Zuckerberg created a handle to notify every single one of your friends? Of course he did. Because he never wants you to leave his app. He wants you to engage with posts and look at ads. He needs you to stay there so he makes money from you.

I used to think notifications were any important way for me to stay informed about what was going on around me. Now that I’m older and way more cynical I see them as a way to make sure my attention gets split and focused back on whatever they want me to see. Which would be fine with one or two critical apps. But with ten or twenty? It’s downright impossible.

Resource Contention

The problem with distractions goes beyond just popping up when you least want them to be there. Even if I can ignore what just flashed across my screen it distracted me and interrupted my flow. When I’m really focusing on something I can block out everything around me. And when some email or app wants to make sure that I know there is a special 20% off coupon for an item that I have to use in the next ten minutes as a way to get me to open the app RIGHT NOW I lose my place and have to get back to where I was. If you’ve ever had to read the same sentence two or three times to remember where you were you know exactly what I mean.

We suck at multitasking. No, don’t fight me on this. We really do. We think we are good at it because we can jump back and forth between things but in reality we are way more efficient when we work on things in uninterrupted blocks of time. When I start writing I only feel effective when I sit down and write everything until I’m done. I don’t like stopping and starting. Multitasking means I’m constantly shifting my focus and forgetting what I was doing. That’s hard for neurotypical people. For neurodiverse folks? It’s hellish.

Your attention is a resource. You need to conserve it just like you would with money or water or electricity. When you see it as something that needs to be allocated and schedule and budgeted you start to see why everyone is so hungry for it. I try to keep my attention focused on things that require it. Yes, I do watch videos or read blog posts. But I do it with purpose. And when I do I try to minimize what’s going on around me. I ensure that my resources are being spent properly to accomplish my goals.

If you haven’t done it yet, I highly recommend doing some simple things to reduce the amount of distractions you are getting hit with. I disabled a large number of notifications on my watch. I still get email updates every half hour or so. I also get messaging notifications. But for every app that I dismissed or rolled my eyes about getting notified for something unimportant? I took it away. It lives on my phone where I can check it when I choose to see it. And now my watch only notifies me when it’s important. When my mom texts me or when I need to stand up.

Tom’s Take

You can take these ideas and run with them. Maybe you want to try the Pomodoro Technique or you want to play around with focus states in your mobile device to minimize distraction. You could work with white noise in the background to sharpen your focus on your task at hand. You could even create a distraction-free desktop environment to ensure you only see what you need to be doing. No matter what you do you need to make sure that you are focused on what’s important to you. Not what someone else thinks you should be seeing.

Attention Resource Deficit

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How much did your last laptop cost? You probably know down to the penny. How much time did it take for you to put together your last Powerpoint deck or fix an issue for a customer? You can probably track that time in the hours you recorded on your timesheet. What about the last big meeting you had of the department? Can you figure out how many hours combined of time that it took to get the business discussed? Pretty easy to calculate when you know how many people and how long it took.

All of these examples are ways that we track resources in the workplace. We want to know how many dollars were invested in a particular tool. We want to figure out how many hours someone has worked on a project or a proposal. We want to know how much of the company’s resources are being invested so we can track it and understand productivity and such. But when’s the last time you tracked your personal resources? I’m not talking about work you do or money you spend. I’m talking about something more personal than that. Because one of the things that I’ve seen recently that is starting to cause issues is the lack of attention we pay to our attention resource.

Running in Overdrive

Our brains run a lot of processes in our body. And a lot of those processes work without attention. Bodily functions like breathing, digestion, and our endocrine system work without us paying attention. That’s because these systems need to work for us every time without stopping. That’s the power of automation.

But the rest of our processes need our attention. Our cognitive processes and higher-order functioning need us to pay attention. Yes, even those tasks that you say you can do without thinking. They require you to pay some sort of conscious attention to what’s going on. And that comes out of your attention budget.

Ever wonder why people are good at multitasking? It’s because they are capable to splitting their attention budget up and paying attention to a couple of different things at the same time. Just like a multitasking computer, human multitasking is just devoting a portion of your attention to a different task for a little bit while you work on something else. But have you ever seen what happens when a CPU gets overloaded with tasks? Sluggish, slow, and unusable.

The same thing happens to people when their attention is drawn in too many different directions. When we exhaust our attention budget we let tasks drop and we stop being able to do things effectively. We have a pool of resources we can use and when those run out we have to take resources from other places. That’s when tasks start getting dropped and such.

People don’t tend to see attention as a finite resource. They see it as a bottomless well that always has a little more available when it’s necessary. We create tools and ideas and systems to help us manage it better. But all those tools are really designed to add a bit more of our fracture attention back to the resource pool. In reality, we’re still shuffling resources back and forth and not really adding to the overall pool. It’s not unlike dealing with a CPU with a finite amount of resources. You can’t get more than this no matter what tricks you use. So you need to learn how to deal with things as they are.

Retreating From the Redline

Internal combustion engines work best when they’re running in their power band, which is the area where they are most effective. The effectiveness of the engine drops off as it approaches the redline, which is the maximum amount of performance you can get without causing damage to the engine. It’s the hard limit, if you will. To apply this to our current discussion, you need to run your brain’s attention span in the power band of focusing on the right tasks as you need to and avoid pushing past the redline of inattention and letting things drop. But how can you do that knowing you have to work from a finite pool of resources? Your brain isn’t a CPU or an RPM gauge on a car. There isn’t a magic meter that will tell you when you’ve exceeded your resource pool.

Step One is the reduce the number of distractions you have. That is way harder than it sounds. There are some easy things you can do that have been documented over the years:

  • Set your email to only update in time segments. Every 15 minutes or even every hour for non-critical stuff. The less time you spend attaching yourself to a constantly-updating mailbox the more productive you can be.
  • Sign out of unnecessary Slack channels. The more you have open, the more attention you’re going to pay to them. And the less attention you have for other things too.
  • Limit social media engagement. Ever find yourself sucked into Facebook or TikTok? That’s by design. The operators want you to stick there and not do anything else. If you have to monitor social media for your job, create rules and lists to keep you focused on task. And save the causal stuff for another day.
  • Use the Pomodoro Technique. I’ve written about it before, but this is a great way to force your brain into focusing for short bursts. Once you can train yourself to block out distractions you can get a lot accomplished.

The second way that I find that I can help refuel my attention pool is to use checklists or some other method of dumping my brain contents in a way that lets me focus. I can put down things that need to be done and check them off as they are completed. But I don’t just put major projects like “Boil the Ocean” or “Put a spaceship on Mars”. Instead, I break everything down into simple, achievable tasks. Why? Because crossing those off the list gives you back some of the attention you dedicated to them. It’s like the programming equivalent of garbage collection. By returning your attention resources back to the pool you have more available to tackle bigger and badder things on your list. And when you ever feel like you aren’t getting enough done you can go back and see all the things you’ve crossed off!

Tom’s Take

I have a double whammy of being unfocused on my best days and being too forgetful to write things down. So I understand the issues of attention resource problems. As much as anyone I really wish I could just wave a magic wand and be able to pay closer attention to what I’m doing. The tricks above are ways that I cope with what I have to deal with. In fact, the number of times I got distracted even just writing this post would probably shock most people reading this. But we work with what we have and we do what we can. The key is to recognize that your attention is a resource that is just as valuable as money or work time. Treat is as such and plan for use and you may find yourself feeling better and being happier and more productive in a number of ways.