Laurent Haug Joins The Attention Economists

Inspired by Steve Rubel’s recent post on the Attention Crash, now Laurent Haug (of Lift) has started to gripe about his attention as a ‘precious resource’ (although I do agree with him about dropping his LinkedIn account, for totally different reasons):

[from The Attention Bubble]

As our time becomes the most precious resource we have, the millions of web pages competing for our attention are becoming a problem. Early adopters – the canaries in the coal mine? – are reacting, arbitrating between all their time consuming actions. When I lost my mobile phone two month ago, I almost didn’t renew my subscription. It’s only after I got blamed by a client who was trying to reach me that I decided to re-order a mobile. Email? I am increasingly forcing myself to only answer them once a day. I let the flow of information get in anytime, but I stack all the answers together, trying to get in a more productive flow once a day to answer. Best practices are coming together to counter the overflow. We just need to create them.

No, we need better techniques to live in the flow, not shut it down. We need to shift away from the web of pages to a web of flow, where what we need will find its way to us. By all means, throw away your RSS reader, spend less time in the email client: but not because of attention economics! Those tools are just really bad at treating time as a shared space.

The real problem underneath everything, the premise never examined, is that browsing the web and living in the email client are simply not where we should be. It’s not that we are overloaded with too much, its that the tools we use are doing a bad job of connecting us to the important things. They are bad tools.

We need to unseat email and browsing — Web 1.0’s linchpins — and move into the web of traffic and flow.