Pondering the Attention Economy

Distractions. They're just the worst, right?

I've found in recent times that I've grown terrible at just sitting down and concentrating. As much as I love writing, the simple pleasure of organising thoughts into words has turned into a struggle of keeping my butt in the chair. I've tried various approaches that have ultimately failed - managing to force some output at the cost of less enjoyment and more burning myself out. Or methods that just failed altogether, with a planned writing session turning into several hours of procrastination.

The evidence tells me there's a deeper issue at play that I need to address if I want to get my output to a place I'm happy with. A few ideas started to bubble up in my mind, but only crystallised into a coherent concept after listening to a recent episode of my favourite podcast Cortex.

In the episode, C.G.P. Grey discussed experiencing similar symptoms while explaining his reasons for taking an internet hiatus. Diminishing ability to focus on one task, distractions seeming more distracting, less motivation to sit down and work, and more temptation to waste time on procrastination activities like spending hours following YouTubes recommendation algorithm.

The culprit is...

Drumroll please?

My own behaviour. Ok, real talk time - I'm about to point the finger at technology and marketing, so it's important to be clear up front. These issues I'm about to highlight exist because of a feedback loop between producers and consumers. The products aren't an issue, it's how we engage with those products that needs re-consideration - and it's in the markets interest to get better and better at enabling what we think we want.

Ok, so we're clear on the fact we're individually responsible for our own choices? Good. Now let's discuss what's happening and exactly which choices are being made poorly.

What is the Attention Economy?

My original draft for this article used the term "Distraction Economy" instead, though a quick google search showed me that phrase is already well used for something slightly different, and by the time I finished clarifying my thoughts I realised what I'm really talking about is attention.

We live in the information age, meaning information is the most highly prized resource in our society. Not just raw data either, but all kinds of intangible things that have no inherent value other than what they mean to us. A chimpanzee has no concept of the Avengers, but Infinity War still made half a billion on opening weekend.

Only, information is relatively limitless. One person gaining knowledge doesn't take it away from anyone else, and there's always more stories and more events. When supply is no concern, demand controls the market. Where information and entertainment are concerned, demand means people paying attention.

Headline: "Please look at us?"

It doesn't matter if you're selling the best product in the world if nobody is listening to your pitch. I wrote an article on S.E.O. earlier this year, a thriving market focused entirely on getting your site more attention by taking advantage of how search engines work. Likewise, when the prize is being where you're looking, it's only natural that everyone wants to grab your attention. I argued then that even if everyone's looking, they'll look away pretty quickly if you have nothing to offer - better to focus on create worthwhile things that people want to find - but people follow the prize. If the apparent reward is from people looking, then as long as they keep looking it doesn't matter how fast they turn away.

Attention Economy, as I define it, is this. A market culture where the value of a thing is largely defined by how much attention it has, so the incentive is to keep as much attention there as possible. Which means a world full of distractions designed to grab your attention and keep you hooked as long as possible.

Directing attention & sugar.

As humans, we're hard-wired to be responsive to this. We evolved in an environment that was relatively distraction free - if something unusual did happen, it was in our best interest to respond immediately because it was probably a lion about to eat us. Only now, those distractions are literally everywhere.

*Cough* Pocket *Cough*

It's like sugar. Our biology drives us to crave sugar, because it's a high energy food rare to our ancestors, so missing an opportunity to eat sugar for a caveman is beyond stupid. So when sugar became wildly available, we went nuts and put it in everything until we discovered too much makes us sick. Now we're backtracking to find a balance, but fighting against our biological impulses to do it.

Also like sugar, it's not automatically bad. The sirens and warning lights on an emergency services vehicle are designed to grab attention, because it's in everyone's best interest to take notice when an ambulance is rushing to save someone's life and you need to get out of the way. Street signs give important information and need to be quickly noticed. Most entertainment relies on being able to hook and keep your interest, because that's the entire point of entertainment.

But if you're used to eating sugar in every meal, suddenly trying the same with no sugar tastes bland and horribly bitter. Your taste buds expect that extra sweetness so everything tastes out of balance without it - same as someone who's never touched sugar eating a handful of candy and complaining it's sickly sweet.

Why would it be any different with our attention - if we're used to letting our focus be dictated by outside factors and jumping to distractions whenever they present themselves, it makes sense that we would grow out of practice at self-direction, and responding to distraction would be as much an ingrained habit as craving sweetness in your tea.

The habit of shallow engagement.

Imagine an Olympic runner who goes out and trains every single day. They eat a light meal before each run, they do everything perfectly during their training. Then the training session is over, and they get in a car and drive home. They order pizza delivered, to avoid getting out of the car for the detour. They eat an entire pizza to themselves while watching tv and being completely inactive, until their next training session comes along. It's hard to imagine that person reaching Olympic level to begin with, right?

I've understood for years the value of long stretches of focused time. I read Cal Newports fantastic book Deep Work a while ago, and set about putting in place the suggested habit of deep work, time that I could just sit and focus, all distraction out the window. But instead of thriving in that window of freedom, I struggled to cope. My mind kept searching for distractions. I had absolutely no reason not to do exactly what I wanted to do, but I was restless to just do it.

I've been curious for a while about finding a holistic approach to writing - that is, finding ways I could build habits into my entire day that would add up to making those few hours at the keyboard as easy as possible for me. But it wasn't until I listened to that podcast I mentioned above that I realised where I was sabotaging myself every other hour.

See, I've been listening to more than the one podcast - I have about seven in my player cue, most of which I'm not even that interested in day to day, I just didn't have any new episodes of the ones I do actively follow and went searching for something to "fill the time". I also listen to audio-books constantly, and I enjoy watching Netflix. Reasonable pastimes, nothing inherently wrong with any of them - if you're using them, rather than letting them use you.

But I was using each of them as a "Something to do while I do X". Something to listen to while I do the dishes, go for a walk, have a shower. Again, nothing inherently wrong with that - but doing that constantly? Listening just for the sake of listening to something? Always having something going? It reached the point that once my phone battery died my automatic response was "I guess I can't do anything until it charges now", before sitting at the computer and loading up YouTube video's as something to do while I wait.

It knows.

I was constantly splitting my focus. When I was cooking, I wasn't giving full attention to the recipe, enjoying the aromas of it or the change in texture as things cooked, watching for the right moment to take away the heat - the cooking was just a chore to keep my hands busy while my attention was elsewhere. Same with cleaning, walking, shopping... anything, really. Even when I turned everything off to say, respond to e-mail, I would open not just my e-mails but Reddit and Facebook at the same time, never less than two things at once so I could flick between them whenever one needed to load, like channel surfing TV in commercial breaks (I currently have two tabs open, to confess, though that's this blog and Brain.fm being used to block out ambient sounds). Yet if I tried to just sit down and listen to the podcast without doing something else at the same time, I couldn't concentrate. I got fidgety. Irritable.

It feels painfully obvious now I type it out like this, but like any bad habit, or even an addiction, it happened slowly over time, creeping into more and more of my day, until I stopped being comfortable without it.

Without realising it, I was constantly training myself into a habit of only partially engaging with any given thing. I was training myself to always have multiple things running at once. To never fully focus on one thing at a time. Until, inevitably, my ability to sit down and concentrate for a length of time started to fade. The constant, passive consumption of media was reaching an addiction level as I forgot how to function without it, even as I grew frustrated with my inability to shut out distractions.

In that state of mind, deep in a habit of shallow engagement with life, is it any wonder that the slightest thing would distract me? That where once I loved having music play to block out the world while I wrote, now even the music is too much a distraction to get anything done?

Change the habit, Change the world.

The good news is that the solution is proving extremely simple. Once we recognise the issue is our habits, not the technology itself, it's just a matter of changing those habits.

Simple. Not necessarily easy. Here's the part where I bash marketing and technology. Our world is heavily, heavily built toward encouraging that shallow engagement I spoke about. With everything competing for our attention, and us naturally giving our attention to the loudest, most invasive thing, everything around us is getting louder and more invasive. It can make it seem like these companies are being malicious when you try to take a step away.

Facebook makes a great example of this. I deleted the app on my phone months back, so that I wanted to access my account I had to go through the web browser and login. So of course, Facebook defaulted to keeping me logged in at all times, and keeps the "log out" button out of sight. Meanwhile, Chrome put Facebook as a quick access button on the home screen, as a regularly used website, so within a few weeks opening Chrome to check facebook was no harder than opening the Facebook app I'd deleted. We default to the path of least resistance. So we kind of just go along with it by default without realising the harm it's doing to us. I want to re-iterate that it's not the content itself that's an issue, it's whether or not we engage actively or passively I've come to see as problematic.

Our world has made it easiest to let our attention be driven by outside influences and surround ourselves with distractions, but we can still make choices to change that. Realistically, it's unlikely that enough people will ever consider this enough of a concern to make any noticeable difference to how the world operates - notice how much sugar is still in everything ever? - but it can help with the impact on your personal life.

Where did everyone go?

Here's what I've done so far;

- I downloaded a website blocking extension for my web browser. Face-book and Reddit are now only accessible through my main browser before 9am or after 9pm. I can still get onto them if I really want to, but the extra steps involved mean it has to be a conscious choice, and more often than not it seems that's enough to make me not interested in using those feeds for "quick fix" novelty. It also means I'm not filling my head with needless trivia about other peoples lives when I have my own life to focus on.

- I've disabled the web browser on my phone completely. It's still connected to the internet, so apps that need data access work fine, but I can't just absently browse the net in moments of boredom. I can still do searches through the Google app when I have a question, but since that opens a clean search window and closes everything when I exit, I haven't been tempted to aimlessly browse with it.

- I reconfigured my phones home screen so the most easily accessible apps are ones with specific purpose, such as the diet tracker I kept forgetting to use and Habatica. This is not only directing that desire to fidget toward productive habits (like tracking what I eat and actually reading the information it gives me about my nutrient intake), but means I still have things like Audible active on my phone without being the first thing I open every time.

- Like the diet tracker, I've set Habatica as one of my most easily accesible apps, and the only game on my home screen. That means if I find myself bored and absently opening something on my phone, it's most likely to be a list of real world things I wanted to get done.

- Most importantly, I've given myself the rule of engaging as much as possible with one thing at a time. It's easier to make a new habit than drop an old one, so instead of telling myself not to listen to a podcast while I shave, for example, I'm focusing on listening to the very subtle sound of the blade doing it's job, forcing me to turn the podcast off anyway.

As an experiment, I'm only about two days in from recognising my flaw. But given the length of this post, written entirely in one morning over about two hours of typing (with an additional couple of hours editing and formatting a few days later :P), and how generally more focused I feel already, it seems to be the right direction.