Steve Rubel Becomes Another Attention Economist

Steve Rubel is following the lead of many others into Toffler's "information overload is driving us crazy" tarpit. He's in good company, joined by Herbert Simon, Tom Davenport, and Linda Stone: the Attention Economists.

[from Micro Persuasion: The Attention Crash]

We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore's Law.

[...]

With this philosophy in mind [Tim Ferliss's 4 Hour Workweek], I have trimmed projects, RSS feeds and emails to hone in on the 20 percent that's most important. It's also why I am not trying every new site that floats in my inbox and deleting pitches that are clearly off topic w/o even reading them.

My attention has reached a limit so I have re-calibrated it to make it more effective. I think this issue is an epidemic.

No, I think we need to develop new behaviors and new ethics to operate in the new context.

Most people operate on the assumption that the response to increased flow is to intensify what was working formerly: read more email, read more blogs, write more IMs, and so on. And at the same time motor on with the established notions of what a job is, how to accomplish work and meet deadlines, and so on.

In a time of increased flow, yes, if you want to hold everything else as is -- your definition of success, of social relationships, of what it means to be polite or rude -- Steve is right: you will have to cut back.

Alternatively, we can start to shift everything, let go of a lot of the old ways, and operate on a new, pre-industrial, pre-agricultural footing.

1. It's OK not to respond to emails, vmails, or IMs. There is no possible way that you can live a public life, open to the world, and respond to every request that comes along. The same holds even if it is a friend, or colleague. People have to pick and choose: it's a big world.
2. It's sensible to have a nomadic reading style: if something is important it will show up in a variety of places. Don't be a slave to RSS readers: throw them away. (I have always hated RSS readers that emulate the email inbox, for exactly this reason: they make everything seem equally important... or equally unimportant.)
3. Unlike Steve (or Tim Ferliss), I don't know exactly how to trim out the 80% of everything that is junk, as Tim Ferliss suggests. I do fire clients that make things difficult, unpleasant, or unrewarding, but it's not statistical. I constantly gravitate to projects and people that I think offer the greatest opportunities for growth, which means constantly leaving other things behind. But this is just another kind of flow, not a one-time triage: it is a constant attrition and acquisition.

Instead of the 4 Hour Workweek, though, I suggest that people read the Tao Te Ching:

9

Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people's approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.

The answer is not becoming obsessed with attention as a limited resource to be husbanded, or thinking of our cognition as a laser beam to be pointed at only at what is important.

We need to unfocus, to rely more on the network or tribe to surface things of importance, and remain open to new opportunities: these are potentially more important than the work on the desk. Don't sharpen the knife too much.

tags: steve+rubel, tim+ferliss, marc+andreesen, flow, attention, attention+economists, tao, tao+te+ching

Comments

[Chris Saad]

I'm going to convince you one day Stowe :)

You're being a purist - and that's ok because we all love you for it. But there is a middle ground.

Manual Trackback
http://www.particls.com/blog/2007/06/attention-economy-vs-flow-continued.html

[Jeff McNeill]

Brilliant. We cannot focus on the 20% because that changes over time, and we won't know what the changes are unless we have some exposure to the 80%.

I think that we can treat information like a river, we drink from the river, we don't try and drink the river. I like the idea of the nomadic that you introduce here. I also think we can make environments smarter. But ultimately it is a practice, as you so eloquently recite. Here is something from a different era and country, and provides yet another sensibility:

From Hakagure: The Book of the Samurai

"It is not good to settle into a set of opinions. It is a mistake to put forth effort and obtain some understanding and then stop at that. At first putting forth great effort to be sure that you have grasped the basics, then practicing so that they may come to fruition is something that will never stop for your whole lifetime. Do not rely on following the degree of understanding that you have discovered, but simply think, "This is not enough." One should search throughout his whole life how best to follow the Way. And he should study, setting his mind to work without putting things off. Within this is the Way."

Sincerely,
Jeff McNeill

[Zbigniew Lukasiak]

Hi Stowe - you asked me to move the discussion about my Social Routing experiment here. I am bit hesitant - as this is all so undefined and I don't know how to write about it yet - but let's try.

The core idea is just what we all were doing all the time - sending links and other interesting info to our friends. I really like doing that - but I don't know if I am doing it right - so I decided to ask my friends to give me more feedback on what I am sending them. My premise is that I'll learn faster then the automatic filters and send stuff that is more relevant at a particular point in someones life. Beat the machine - that is my goal. I can tell you what sources I read - and promise to send you links to stuff that should interest you. Be your aggregator for them.

Eventually there can be lot's of things that could be automated and organized and perhaps we shall write some software to do that? For example:
- comparing the OPML lists - so that people could easily exchange coverage - I'll be your filter for slashdot and you'll be mine for reddit
- posting public feeds of stuff sent - perhaps someone would have a similar taste to yours and subscribe to the links I send to you (some part would still have to remain private - how would we do that?)
- clubs and networks

But the main idea is about personal connections - it's all about your 'buddy list as the centre of the universe'. There are lots of social networking sites that start from some abstracts - I plan to start with practical, personal angle and then try to augment it with automated tools.

[jessica lipnack]

stowe, i'm with you on this post. i understand the cries of anguish about attentionoverload but, ime, it's a lot like being a parent with a bunch of little kids. if you respond to everything, you cannot move forward. let the really huge screams get you moving and otherwise let your inner passions guide the way. less is more, as mr. buckminster fuller said.

[Edward Vielmetti]

Stowe -

I don't think you have to invent a new field of "attention economics" - might be better to treat this as a special case of "behavioral economics" and draw from that work.

In particular, there's a framing question about how we perceive lots of information coming at us. The observation is that when we have too many choices of things to do, we're less happy with any one choice. If you perceive all the information bombarding you as one continuous flow, you'll be a lot more happy with your choices on how to navigate that flow that someone else who has similar inputs but who views it as many different and distinct things to be dealt with.

(Here's a link to a 2005 Boston Fed meeting:

http://www.boston.com/business/personalfinance/articles/2005/12/19/mind_over_money/

that does the newspaper style overview.)

[Chris Brogan...]

I think it becomes a matter of sampling versus flat out reading. With regards to groups, emails, IMs, and presence apps like Twitter (now Pownce), I feel the trick is that none of us should be trying to read it all. Dip in, take what you need, get out.

Twitter and other apps of its kind are not made to read. They're a pulse point we're supposed to absorb and then move on from.

Best to you, sir.

--Chris Brogan...

[Ken]

One of the manufacturing guys over at Evolving Excellence came to similar conclusions about "information obesity" while thinking about the bizarre regulatory/demand situation that created corn overproduction.

http://www.evolvingexcellence.com/blog/2007/07/the-obesity-epi.html

Ken

[stilīgs siviešu tops]

it's not a funny tops if something is important it will show up in a variety of places, they're a pulse point we're supposed to absorb and then move on from.