Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
(Source: underpaidgenius)
The Myth of Monotasking - Cathy Davidson via HASTAC
Why the debate about attention — multi- versus mono-tasking — is really about institutions:
Cathy Davidson, The Myth Of Monotasking
[…] If we want to change our institutions, we have to believe that it is the institutional structures that are the problem, not the new conditions of life that institutions should be supporting. That is, if we believe that technology is making us dumb, distracted, shallow, and lonely—as some have said—then we should be insisting that school stay exactly as stultifying, bubble-tested, standardized, and hierarchical as it is now. By contrast, if we realize that we are in the midst of a monumental historical change and one reason we feel distracted and disjointed is because there is a mismatch between the educational institutions that help to form us and the changed world in which we live, then there is motivation to change our institutions to help us in this new world.
So attention is key. I side with those neuroscientists who argue the brain doesn’t know how to “monotask.” Multitasking is a way of life, and disruption is what saves us from our own attention blindness. Right now, we are often blind to how much how world has changed and how essential it is to change our institutions to support that change.
And, I believe, the institutions involved are not just schools, but work. We need to change the world of work to reflect and support the way our minds actually work, instead of attempting to force ourselves into some ideological mindset. A mindset where our attention must be focused at every second, like a laser, working on the next task in our work queue. However, cognitive science shows that this is folklore — or religious doctrine — rather than an appraisal of how we actually operate cognitively. This is the war on flow I have been writing about for years.
This is not dissimilar to the obsession in Western culture with individuality and autonomy, which is such a strong bias that people are unwilling to accept how much of our cognition is social, and that many of the behaviors we consider individual are in fact group phenomena.
The mind wanders a lot because the mind’s task is to wander.
The 5 Most Pretentious Productivity Buzzwords - Mike Vardy
I guess I am getting used to seeing my name in other people’s posts on topics I’m interested in, but in this case I think Mike Vardy got what I said backwards, in a piece about productivity buzzwords:
Mike Vardy via The Next Web
5. Flow
Actual Definition: To proceed smoothly and readily.
Virtual Definition: A way to say that you can’t be interrupted or progress will grind to a halt.
I’ll be the first to admit that when I’m writing, I’m in a state of flow. And I hate to be interrupted when I’m in that state. But the prevalence of the term on the Web has created the notion that once flow is broken, then it’s okay that progress stops. And since flow comes at any given time and without warning, then all you can do is wait for it. Not true. Some things require full attention and a state of flow is perhaps the “fullest” of attention one can offer, and some don’t. When I come out of flow, I can work on emails, reading and things that can be done and can be afforded interruption.
“The small shift of consciousness that comes from remaining in the flow setting — messages and posts flitting by, dozens of chats, firing off quick updates to your circles of contacts — seems like the devil to the advocates of industrial age thinking and practices.” – Stowe Boyd
So while not everyone appreciates flow, it is a powerful tool — as long as its power is being used for good (getting the best out of a person) and not for evil (getting hardly anything out of a person).
I think Vardy’s definition of flow is too restrictive, making the case that flow equates to concentrating on a single thing. However, flow means being in a zone where everything seems to be working together, and there is time for decisions to be made, actions to be taken. Think about the players on a basketball team, playing at their peak: they see the floor, the other players, and move effortlessly to where the ball is going to be. They aren’t distracted when a team mate calls to them: it’s all part of the flow.
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi characterizes flow as energized focus, being completely immersed in an activity. But the boundaries of what is part of the activity — and what is outside of it — is as flexible as the range of human endeavor. It is not limited to a single unitary task of short duration.
But for many, flow has become synonymous with a exclusionary focus on a single activity, but I don’t use it that way.
new tools in general, and Twitter in particular, greatly challenge the binary dichotomy of attention as something that is either given or taken away, distracted. Instead, these tools allow us to direct attention to destinations where it can be sustained with more concentration and immersion.
- Maria Popova, In a new world of informational abundance, content curation is a new kind of authorship
Go read the whole piece: it is truly brilliant.
I also find it extremely interesting that Popova is using a technique in this piece that I have developed here, where I call out the most critical statements in my work. She’s using bold, while I make the fonts larger. In this way, a cursory scan read will still hit paydirt. She’s writing about the change in our attention and the job of curators, and certainly pulling out the central themes is one such job.
Augmented Reality Interface Exploits Human Nervous System to Cut Down on Distraction - Technology Review This is an interesting and somewhat counterintuitive use of Augmented Reality technologies: reducing information overload
Their solution is as straightforward as it is ingenious: display objects that demand attention in the user’s peripheral vision as simple icons that can be processed even by the limited visual acuity of our peripheral vision. If a user wants more information, for example to read an email represented in the peripheral vision by an icon, simply concentrating on the object brings up a higher-resolution instance of it with as much attached information as necessary.
There is information overload at every level of the military — from the general to the soldier on the ground.
- Art Kramer, cited by Thom Shanker and Matt Richtel, In New Military, Data Overload Can Be Deadly
Interesting mention of mindfulness training, amid all the usual diatribe about multitasking ruining our minds.
Worry about information overload has become one of the drumbeats of our time. The world’s books are being digitized, online magazines and newspapers and academic papers are steadily augmented by an endless stream of blog posts and Twitter feeds; and the gadgets to keep us participating in the digital deluge are more numerous and sophisticated. The total amount of information created on the world’s electronic devices is expected to surpass the zettabyte mark this year (a barely conceivable 1 with 21 zeroes after it).
Many feel the situation has reached crisis proportions. In the academic world, critics have begun to argue that universities are producing and distributing more knowledge than we can actually use. In the recent best-selling book “The Shallows,” Nicholas Carr worries that the flood of digital information is changing not only our habits, but even our mental capacities: Forced to scan and skim to keep up, we are losing our abilities to pay sustained attention, reflect deeply, or remember what we’ve learned.
Beneath all this concern lies the sense that humanity is experiencing an unprecedented change — that modern technology is creating a problem that our culture and even our brains are ill equipped to handle. We stand on the brink of a future that no one can ever have experienced before.
But is it really so novel? Human history is a long process of accumulating information, especially once writing made it possible to record texts and preserve them beyond the capacity of our memories. And if we look closely, we can find a striking parallel to our own time: what Western Europe experienced in the wake of Gutenberg’s invention of printing in the 15th century, when thousands upon thousands of books began flooding the market, generating millions of copies for sale. The literate classes experienced exactly the kind of overload we feel today — suddenly, there were far more books than any single person could master, and no end in sight. Scholars, at first delighted with the new access to information, began to despair. “Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books?” asked Erasmus, the great humanist of the early 16th century.
But amid the concern, that crisis began to generate something else: a raft of innovative new methods for dealing with the accumulation of information. These included early plans for public libraries, the first universal bibliographies that tried to list all books ever written, the first advice books on how to take notes, and encyclopedic compilations larger and more broadly diffused than ever before. Detailed outlines and alphabetical indexes let readers consult books without reading them through, and the makers of large books experimented with slips of paper for cutting and pasting information from manuscripts and printed matter — a technique that, centuries later, would become essential to modern word processing.
- Ann Blair, Information overload, the early years
A very solid and well-researched examination of the attention overload meme, similar to the themes I discussed in The False Question Of Attention Economics.
Anne Truitt Zelenka v Peter Drucker
Anne has a solid post that includes this in a recast of something Peter Drucker once wrote:
[from Knowledge Economy (Drucker) vs. Web Economy (Zelenka)
Web workers do not start with their tasks or with their time [Drucker stated that executives start by examing where their time ‘goes’.]. They start with their attention. And they do not start out with planning or by finding out where their time actually goes. They start by finding where their attention wanders, and what gives them energy and increased attention. Then they attempt to let their attention flow freely and to cut back on redundant or tired information sources that demand their attention without providing new ideas or insight. Finally they combine what they have found into something new (software, web design, industry analysis, etc.) and make it available on the web where it can earn attention itself and lead to an ongoing multiplication of attention.
Unveiling the new Jaiku Client for Nokia - Part 2
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.
- 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.
- 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.)
- 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.
