The Attention Management Blog

Dave Pell, on Screen Rage:

Of course, as in most cases, our kids are simply modeling our behavior. Having a disproportionately enraged reaction to being interrupted during screen-time is a characteristic that’s hardly limited to five year-olds. I regularly find myself snapping at my kids or feeling overly irritated with adults when faced with the seemingly simple demand that I drag my gaze away from my screen when I’m in the middle of something (anything really). And since I’m always-on, and my screen provides access to so much of what I do – work, social life, leisure time, writing this article – I’m permanently  in the middle of something. My son was born around the time of the original iPhone. So I’ve been asking him to “Just give me a second” for his whole life. …

Wanting to focus and being irritated by distractions and interruptions is nothing new. I’m sure my dad missed a few of my childhood moments while he was at the office. But now the office is seamlessly connected to games, music, texting, email, social networking, entertainment, and everything else. The hierarchy of things worthy of earning our focus has largely collapsed. If it glows, it’s worthy. The screen doesn’t care what you’re doing. I see modern parents miss childhood moments while they’re playing Words with Friends. “Just give me a second…”

Clay Shirkey, in the Findings blog post series on How We Will Read:

One of the things that bugs me about the Kindle Fire is that for all that I didn’t like the original Kindle, one of its greatest features was that you couldn’t get your email on it. There was an old saying in the 1980s and 1990s that all applications expand to the point at which they can read email. An old geek text editor, eMacs, had added a capability to read email inside your text editor. Another sign of the end times, as if more were needed. In a way, this is happening with hardware. Everything that goes into your pocket expands until it can read email.

But a book is a “momentary stay against confusion.” This is something quoted approvingly by Nick Carr, the great scholar of digital confusion. The reading experience is so much more valuable now than it was ten years ago because it’s rarer. I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”

It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.” The endless gratification offered up by our devices means that the experience of reading in particular now becomes something we have to choose to do.

Seth Godin:

The first thing you do when you sit down at the computer?

Let me guess: check the incoming. Check email or traffic stats or messages from your boss. Check the tweets you follow or the FB status of friends.

You’ve just surrendered not only a block of time but your freshest, best chance to start something new. …

The first thing you do should be to lay tracks to accomplish your goals, not to hear how others have reacted/responded/insisted to what happened yesterday.

Clay Johnson, author of the soon-to-be-released The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption, answering the question, “Does going on an information diet improve one’s productivity?” on Quora:

The concept of an information diet shouldn’t be to “shut away all information consumption and focus on doing work.”

If you look at food — the most common place where we have the concept of “diet” we’d never say that a healthy diet is “temporarily not eating” — that’s either waiting between meals/snacks, fasting, or anorexia, but it’s not dieting. A healthy information diet means being selective about one’s information intake, and consciously consuming it.

Can an information diet that’s focused on creating healthy consumption of information improve one’s productivity? You bet — if anything, trying to cap your total daily information intake will increase your productivity by adding more time to your life. The average American spends 11 hours a day consuming information while they’re not at work and many of us who work in front of a computer end up spending a lot of time consuming information while at work, too. …

My information diet consists of a cap of 6 hours a day of total, proactive information consumption. That means everything that requires my explicit attention that doesn’t involve another person — television, movies, the Internet, email, social networks — if it involves a URL, a mouse, or a remote control, that goes into that 6 hours. It doesn’t mean anything physically social or stuff I have no control over, like advertisements on the subway, or music in the grocery store.

Of that six hours, I spend 2 hours on entertainment and 4 hours on work related research and communication. Sometimes that changes — on weekends, for instance, I spend the full six hours doing whatever the heck I want, as long as it’s not more than six hours. By capping it at six hours, it also forces me to do things like go for a long walk with my wife, or cooking a good dinner, or producing information. That’s been a heck of an improvement not only on my productivity, but in my marriage and on my overall health.

Augusten Burroughs, on writing:

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It’s not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.

John Gruber, on Steve Jobs and some fresh grass stains on his sneakers:

Why wear this grass-stained pair for the keynote, a rare and immeasurably high-profile public appearance? My guess: he didn’t notice, didn’t care. One of Jobs’s many gifts was that he knew what to give a shit about. He knew how to focus and prioritize his time and attention. Grass stains on his sneakers didn’t make the cut.

Late last night, long hours after the news broke that he was gone, my thoughts returned to those grass stains on his shoes back in June. I realize only now why they caught my eye. Those grass stained sneakers were the product of limited time, well spent. And so the story I’ve told myself is this:

I like to think that in the run-up to his final keynote, Steve made time for a long, peaceful walk. Somewhere beautiful, where there are no footpaths and the grass grows thick. Hand-in-hand with his wife and family, the sun warm on their backs, smiles on their faces, love in their hearts, at peace with their fate.

“Self-regulation failure is the major social pathology of our time.”

– Dr. Roy Baumeister, author of Willpower

Professor Alan Jacobs, on computers and their place in education, and specifically, in the classroom:

If I tell my students to put away their laptops while we’re in class, I am not telling them to repudiate laptops, or other technologies, altogether. My policy in recent years has been to press my students to experiment with a wide range of digital technologies in their research and writing, and in many cases to encourage them to use those technologies collaboratively — but when we’re in class, that’s book time. During the handful of hours that we’re together each week, the best use of that time, I think, is to work diligently with the technology of the book. Usually that means codices, but if it’s Kindles or Nooks, that’s fine too. But class time is book time; other times are for other technologies.