Paying Attention?

Ah, you are. Good. I’m not, most of the time. Or rather, I’m paying attention to far too many things at once.

And of course, I am not alone. These days, attention is a scarce resource, and like any scarce resource, there are people trying to create a market for it.

The interesting thing about attention is that everyone has the same amount. You can’t get more than 24 hours a day no matter how wealthy you are - and unless you’re popping Ampakines (and given that they’re not currently available outside of clinical trials, you’re probably not), you’re stuck with a lot less than that.

In truth, I’m not completely sold on the AttentionTrust idea of recording everything you pay attention to specifically so that you can sell that information to people who want to market things to you. Ok, I can see in principal that it’s better that you have control over that data than others, but surely collecting your own attention data isn’t going to stop others from collecting and selling it as well, unless you put some effort into trying to stop them.

Attention is a limited resource - attention data, on the other hand, is increasingly common.

6-7 years ago I wrote a retail reporting application for a huge supermarket franchise operation, and I noted the way they were tracking people’s shopping habits using the first loyalty card in this country that worked across all sorts of different types of shop. At the time I thought “you know, these things are essentially tracking cookies in meatspace”. I never did get one of those cards, and shop people look at me funny now when I say I don’t have one. I presume the credit cards also aggregate shopping data and sell it, hopefully without any names attached, but who knows these days. The analogy isn’t perfect, shopping data isn’t attention data, they’re quite different, but still, I feel uncomfortable about people gathering that information, and almost as uncomfortable about gathering it myself and then selling it!

But keeping track of what you pay attention to seems like a good idea. I rather suspect it could be quite scary to see how many times my attention switched in any given day last year. I’m just not so sure about uploading that data to anyone else’s machine to do analysis on it. Perhaps I’m just being paranoid.

In any case, this year, I have resolved to be more mindful with my attention, because it turns out that the best way to get value for your attention isn’t multitasking, but to try your best to focus on one thing at a time. Well, not quite true - different parts of your brain can be paying attention to different things, but the language bits and the heavy thinking bits in particular are really not designed for heavy task switching.

A PC with a dozen applications open and a browser with 20 tabs open doesn’t help, thats for sure. This sort of technology driven reduction in attention span has two names that you might be hearing yet more of in 2007: Continuous Partial Attention (mostly benign), and Attention Deficit Trait (mostly malignant). Frankly I think I’ve been afflicted with the latter for this entire decade, while the former I’ve mostly managed to avoid. I don’t feel a huge need to stay connected to my peers, I’m an introvert. On the other hand I do feel strangely compelled to keep track of what’s going on in the worlds of science, technology, and politics, which has been a smeg of a lot lately, so I focus on a few key areas, but even those are impossible to keep up with.

PS: Our browser addon can increase your focus and reduce your context switching while you’re using the web. It’s by no means a magic bullet, but I’m hoping we might be able to raise your average working IQ a smidgen this year, and have you browsing a little more cluefully. We’re launching soon, honest, but do try the beta, we need more feedback.

PPS: Happy New Year. May it be a productive and prosperous one for all my readers. Sometime soon I’ll get around to posting all my New Years Resolutions, but like some other things I could mention, I’m still tweaking them for optimal performance.