Attention Mastery: How Seasoned Professionals Can Thrive in a Distracted World
On an average day, how much of your attention do you own? Are you choosing where your focus is going? Or do you feel the day runs away from you? There’s so much getting in the way. How can we reclaim our attention in a world of sensory overload and non-stop videoconferencing?
Notifications pulls us out of work, apps highjack our attention, a phone dinging draws us out of conversations. Add to that a global pandemic and bouts of doom scrolling, it's no wonder we feel distracted and unfocused so often.
Did you know that when you Google “Attention Scarcity,” articles about marketing come up. Hmm. And when you Google “Attention Hacking,” articles about marketing come up too—in fact, that term refers to how digital service developers intentionally design products to attract the maximum amount of engagement from users—to seize your focus.
Attention is a precious resource and there are all kinds of people out there vying for ours. Add to that family and work obligations, and there’s little focus left in the day.
Or is there? It’s easy to blame information overload, app designers and outside obligations. But who is deciding to pay attention? And who then falls prey to “I should be doing this” and “I ought to be doing that”? Who is not questioning the real necessity or immediacy of this or that action?
If you are anything like me, you know the answer. It may even make you squirm a little. As the behavioural scientist B.J. Fogg reminds us, “You can’t get people to do something they don’t want to do.”
What happens if we pay a little more attention to where we are focusing our attention, and why?
What is Attention?
Attention is an action: it involves selecting—consciously or unconsciously—a limited number of focal points from a larger set. We do it all the time. Our mind is constantly paying attention to all kinds of things we are not even unaware of. Furthermore, as Dr. Charles Shroeder at Columbia University says, “A critical, yet poorly understood component of attention, is the ability to deploy processing resources in advance of anticipated stimuli. Such preparatory attention goes to the very heart of the brain’s capacity to predict, and to organize its data gathering and processing accordingly.” Wow.
So we’re constantly busy, consuming energy, which means that our capacity for attention is necessarily limited. The magical number defined by psychologists is seven plus or minus one or two things. Some say working memory can handle about four things at once.
Whatever the actual number, our attention is quite sophisticated and deserving of our attention.
Pay Attention
In 1971 Herbert A. Simon, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, brought all of our attention to where we were headed: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: the attention of its recipients.”
Attention is one of our greatest resources, along with our energy and our optimism. What would happen if we deliberately chose where it goes as often as possible?
That would imply radically saying no. Flow specialist Steven Kotler talks about ruthlessly eliminating non-essentials in order to reach that highly productive state more often. We survive because we have an ability to pay attention to important things and ignore the rest. We do it all day long. We delete information to focus on what is important. We are delete machines. Let’s own it.
Get Purposeful
In an experiment at Harvard University, Matthew Killingsworth found that the mind wanders on average 47% of the time. More interesting, people are less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not. Lack of focus makes us unhappy.
Rather than be at the mercy of outside influences, how can we choose to be happier? To turn our attention to where we want it to be in a sustainable and fulfilling fashion?
There’s a two-step paradigm shift involved:
Moving from randomly taking whatever is on offer to consciously nurturing where we put our attention.
Acknowledging that attention has no intrinsic feel-good value to it. We can pay attention, even when it’s uncomfortable.
How to Be More Focused
Here’s a list of ideas related to those small things that rob our attention.
How we breath. It’s not news that breathing can help focus the mind. The invitation today is to pay attention to how you are breathing when you aren’t thinking about it. Quick shallow breaths? Through the mouth? Both of these cause more stress than calm, and although stress can focus your attention temporarily, hyper-vigilance doesn't help us choose our focus. Breath through your nose. Slow your breath. Try three 4-7-8 breaths—breathe in deeply through your nose for four counts, hold your breath for seven counts, then slowly release your breath through your pursed lips for eight counts. This will reduce stress immediately and allow you to enter a space of choice more easily.
What we forget. We forget to put ourselves first in order to then serve others better. We forget our basic values and what’s most important. All as we get caught up in the day-to-day tsunami. The best way to improve memory? Put an end to multitasking. Other than being literally impossible—you never really do two things at once, you split your attention and do one after the other, so neither that well—a recent study in Nature demonstrated that with all the media multitasking we are doing, memory retrieval is getting harder. We’re losing our memory. The more we multitask, the more our attention lapses, and the more we forget. So, stop it.
When we focus. The body functions on a number of different rhythms: the circadian rhythm based on the day-night cycle; infradian rhythms, which are longer (monthly cycles, seasonal cycles); and ultradian rhythms, which are shorter, and include appetite, heart rate and arousal. There’s even a circasemidian rhythm—twice a day our body temperature increases along with our cognitive performance—usually in the morning and the early evening. It’s all flat in the afternoon. That’s me: I’m hyper focused in the morning and useless after lunch. Mind you, we are all different. The idea is to figure out, based on your own rhythm, when you actual perform the best and stop trying to force it when you don’t.
How we apply our principles. This is about how we “should” on ourselves all the times. What if we were to question our shoulds and oughts more often? Even the use of these words feeds into the overwhelm fallacy. What is really urgent? What do I really need to do? I like to change out “I have to do this” with “I choose to do this.”
How we take breaks. Energy is a key element in focus, so we need renewal—and we need it regularly, based on an overall ultradian rhythms of about 90 minutes. Less if you’re on Zoom. It is not possible to hold back to back meetings and be attentive. We need to schedule in breaks. Length is less important than quality—turn fully off for two minutes, close your eyes, breath, stretch, and look into the distance. Try novelty—interrupting habitual patterns and routines gives our brains a boost.
Where in time we place our attention. It’s common for us humans to soothsay: we are constantly predicting the future (that’s how our minds function, as we saw earlier). That said, when we focus too much on the future, we slip into anxiety. We have no control over it. Similarly, we often spend time rewriting the past—“if only I had…” That’s a complete energy suck. The time to be focused is the present. Here and now. On the journey, not the outcome.
“The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”
A Short List of Focus Hacks
Turn off those damn notifications.
Try functional sounds, like BrainFM or binaural beats.
Set up time and space boundaries for distractions: name when and where you will be distracted.
Close your eyes and move your awareness to your heart. Then focus your attention. It may sound kooky, but it works. Try it.
Continually ask “Am I making a conscious choice?”
Get nutrition, hormones and sleep right.
Move. Yoga and resistance training contribute to increased focus.