Three steps to manage your attention span at the workplace
Welcome to the age of information overload. The information overload is not going to go away, and, in fact, will continue to increase relentlessly because the world has switched from the “filter, then publish” mode of the non-digital world to the “publish, then filter” model of the digital world. We use time as the first filter to plan our priorities for the day. However, the world we live in today is no longer about time; it is about “attention”. On any given day, you have about 8-10 hours of work time, but possibly only 3-4 hours of attention time. You may “block” your time for a 2-hour meeting, but you “pay” attention for maybe just 15 minutes. The verb “paying” just shows how valuable our attention is.
The primary filter, therefore, needs to move from “how do I manage my time?” to “how do I manage my attention?”.
The first step in managing your attention is, well, to pay attention to your attention. In psychology speak, this is called metacognition, or thinking about your thoughts. Popularly practised as mindfulness, paying attention to your attention is about letting go of time consciousness, and building attention consciousness. If I am in a meeting, how focused am I in the meeting? Thinking through what you want to achieve during the day, rather than managing tasks in your to-do list, is a way of paying attention to attention. Pause every few hours to check with yourself: What am I doing right now? Is it important for achieving the goals I set for myself? If not, why am I doing this? Technology is here to help you. There are many “reflection apps” that encourage you to pause during your busy day and do a quick filter check. The second step in managing your attention is to pay attention to the content of your attention. It is often called critical consumption filter, but noted communication specialist Howard Rheingold borrows a phrase from Ernest Hemingway to call it, well, a crap-detection filter. Ask yourself, is the information you are consuming going to help further your goals for the day? Email is a zillion times more boring than watching cat memes, but in all likelihood, it is hopefully closely related to at least some of your goals for the day. The third step in managing your attention is to build filters that go beyond the dumb simplicity of machine algorithms. Filtering emails by “not marked in the ‘To’ list” is easy to implement. However, by doing so, you outsource your prioritization filter to a machine, and to another human, who decided to add you to the “CC” list rather than the “To” list while sending out the mail. The content of the mail, which should be the most important filter, is no longer important. Noted productivity expert Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero is often confused with having zero mails in the inbox. Mann says Zero Inbox “is the amount of time an employee’s brain is in his inbox”. Converting your mailbox into a to-do list is selecting one of the poorest filters to manage information.
The author is the founder of Bookbhook.com,an attention economy service that helps you read one life-changing book everyday