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#51 -Attention and Sex
By Scott Berkun, March 21, 2006
What things in your life demand undivided attention? Whatever they are,
I claim they define your life more than anything else you do. Your
obituary will not list the hours you fought off boring meetings or
ignored your friends by reading forgettable blurbs about forgettable
things on your cell phone or laptop. Instead its the intimate, deep
moments that refuse division that matter. The wise and happy throughout
history have found ways to avoid situations that demand divided
attention. They convert the fractured experience into the meaningful
(and perhaps magical) by investing their attention wisely.
There isnt a single great work in the history of civilization, no
novel, symphony, film, or song that was completed as a 1/5th time-slice
between e-mail, IM, cellphones and television. Despite the modern drive
to consume things made by others, time will always be our most finite
resource and it crumbles when split into tiny little pieces. And its
up to us to choose how much of life is spent passively (consuming,
waiting, watching) vs. actively (thinking, debating, feeling, doing,
making). Whatever we choose, when we die, we have no one to blame but
ourselves for where our time, and attention, went.
Free money and sex if you read this now! (Laying the attention trap)
Were told our senses bring us the world, but the opposite is more
accurate: our senses filter the world down to what weve needed to
survive. Our eyes see only a fraction of the kinds of light around us
(e.g. ultraviolet, infra-red). We can only see 140 degrees of 360
meaning we see less than 50% of what is going on at any time around our
bodies. The human range of hearing is comically bad compared to most
house pets and insects. In short, our senses are designed to focus our
attention on what matters for our survival. Our senses ignore many
times more data than they bring to our brains. Its knowing what to
ignore that makes us successful, not how many volumes of data we can
consume at the same time. Ask any successful athlete, performer, or
writer about how they consistently perform at high levels and theyll
tell you about focus, and the discipline of centering their attention
on what theyre doing. They practice and drill so that basic tasks
become so familiar that they dont have to think about them anymore,
focusing instead on the details most of us miss.
Crosswalk demanding attentionThe challenge is that in the last 50 years
weve designed things purposefully to attract attention. TV
commercials, websites and advertisements of all kinds are machines
that, by design, take advantage of our limited means of perception. We
know that red, fast, sexy, blinking things play on our reptilian brains
and few can resist granting attention to them. This is an old tactic,
as flowers, fruits and plants have played similar games for eons, just
not on the same scale. No flower has ever spent millions researching
strategies for advertisements, training a species over time to eat when
theyre not hungry, or to compulsively seek information for information
sake, yet our man-made attractions do this every day. In a pre-historic
age, creatures competed for survival. In an information age, we, as
corporations and people, compete for each others attention. Were
supposed to be in a golden age of leisure time since most hard labor is
done for us, but somehow weve fallen into a place where time gained
from innovations falls away like sand between our hands, phones and
keyboards.
The Law of lost attention
The danger of misguided attention is this: how we spend our attention
changes the value of what we spend it on. If you participate in
potentially intimate activities, like sports, conversation, or
non-casual sex (meaning both emotionally and physically intimate),
treating them with split attention, will inevitably make them
non-intimate experiences. Like a flower that doesnt get enough water,
an intimate experience can only grow to the depth and quality of the
time given to it. If you only spend a fast food amount of attention,
you will never have a 5 star dining experience (See Slow food
movement). The same applies to everything: relationships, talents,
experiences. Fast food (and sex) can be fun, but theyre unlikely to be
fulfilling if thats all you have. They work best as counterpoints to
deeper, slower, more wonderfully intimate things.
Law of lost attention: The value of something you spend attention
on is dependent on how much attention you spend on it.
Whenever someone is lost in waves of e-mail and information, theyre
often oblivious to the deepest tragedy of their time. Its not the
stress of dealing with so many requests and obligations (as real and
challenging as that stress might be). Its that somewhere in the wash
of interactions and split attentions is the missed possibility theyre
looking for: Meaning. Depth of experience. Connection. To quote Pirsig,
The truth knocks on the door and we say, Go away. Im looking for the
truth. In the race to clean out inboxes and scratch items off the
to-do list, we miss chances to find the thing weve created the inbox
and to-do list for. Like an American tourist in Europe racing from site
to site with barely a moment to take a picture or talk to someone not
on their tour bus, were trapped in a quantity mentality, despite our
quality based desires.
Reclaiming attention
We are information insecure. The compulsion for more is driven by lack
of confidence in what we already have. Out of a secret kind of fear we
are convinced that the next e-mail or link is better than the one were
reading now. The result is a private rat race: what does it mean to
stay on top of information that doesnt satisfy?
Theatre of attentionThe unspoken dream is to be attention rich. To have
enough attention that at any time were comfortable digging in to
something that we connect with. But if were always spending our
attention as if it has no value, and were attention poor, we dont
have enough attention to spend even when we find the things were
looking for.
Its true that the hunt and intensity of multitasking can be fun
there are thrills in chasing things, physical or virtual, but most
evidence shows we perform worse at all things multitasked. Despite how
it feels, it appears our minds dont work best when split this way. And
given the law of lost attention, we may be multi-tasking over the very
experiences we're multi-tasking to find.
Reclaiming attention starts with a leap of faith in believing the
following sentence: you do not need more than what you have. When you
survive that leap, which you will, its easy to convince yourself that
you need less of the attention consuming things in your life than you
currently have. Youll soon find that every important ambition for your
life is best served by treating your attention with the conservation it
deserves. Instead of splitting your mind to keep busy, move your body
to somewhere worthy of all the attention you have.
The attention challenge
Heres a test to help sort how your attention is working for you. Make
a list of all the things you read, check, skim, or browse every day
(Include every gadget or device you use once a day). Make a second list
of why youre spending your attention on them. What are you trying to
achieve or feel? Rank the first list based on the second. Then cut the
first list in half or by one-third and see what happens. If you
survive, let me know how it went.
See also the excellent wikipedia entry on attention.
How do you manage attention? Does being attention rich or poor impact
your life? Share it in the forums.
Scott's best selling book, the art of project management, all about
successfully leading and managing teams of people, has two free
chapters: How to figure out what to do and How to make things happen,
you can read them here.
