Chapter 8. Attention Fitness..
My friend Rajneesh and I plodded down the pathway next to the C&O Ca.n.a.l on our 18th mile of a 20 mile run. For the first two hours, we talked about work or technology, politics or how our weeks had been, but after the first 10 miles our minds began to care less about the weekly minutia of our lives and more about our ability to survive. We"d been at it for about four hours, and about two hours before, we"d lost our ability to carry on cogent conversation.
I called out, "15613," and he called out, "15626," and then I replied, "15639." For the past two hours, we"d simply been adding thirteens together. We"d done this little ritual over 1200 times-about 10 times a minute-for one reason: to keep our minds focused on something else other than agony.
Raj and I had stumbled upon what scientists call a strategic allocation of attention. It"s something that psychologist Walter Mischel discovered in 1972, when he conducted a study on deferred gratification called the "marshmallow test."[79]
Mischel brought children aged four to six years into a room free from distractions, and asked them to choose a treat: a pretzel stick, an Oreo cookie, or a marshmallow. Their treat of choice was placed on a table with a chair in front of it, and the children were told that they could have the treat right away or, if they waited for 15 minutes, they could get a second treat.
If you"ve ever been around kids, sweets, and willpower, you already know what happened: most of the kids fell apart. Only a third were able to double their payoff. The rest of the kids ate the marshmallow, and most didn"t make it anywhere close to 15 minutes.
What Mischel found, though, was that the children who were able to pa.s.s the test wanted the marshmallow just as much as their short-term investing peers. What they possessed wasn"t willpower, but a better skill at "strategic allocation of attention." The kids that succeeded spent the 15 minutes doing something other than obsessing about the marshmallow: they sang songs, took naps, and avoided even looking at the marshmallow. You can find the research videos on YouTube, where you"ll see this effect in action if you watch. The successful children are the ones who fill their minds up with things other than the deliciousness of marshmallows.
The interesting part came a decade later, when Mischel followed up with the teenagers. The third of children that did succeed turned out to have scored higher on the SAT (Scholastic Apt.i.tude Test) than those that couldn"t wait for their sugar high. They were arguably on their way to more life success than the ones who had failed. Our ability to exercise this strategic allocation of attention is a cognitive resource that indicates academic success.
Willpower.
A few years ago, I found myself completely unable to read more than a thousand words. There was no way I could read long-form journalism or even a book. The concept of reading a book, much less writing one, was completely foreign to me.
With emails to check and reply to, I could spend the entire day trapped in a sea of distraction, having accomplished nothing. My life was littered with notifications. The little email envelope icon sitting next to the clock on my computer, the Twitter notifications, and Facebook took so much time to process that I wasn"t able to accomplish much else. My suffering was coming from a lack of will to focus.
Some scientists certainly seem to think it"s the case that willpower is an exhaustible resource in the mind. In the book Willpower (Penguin, 2011), Roy Baumeister and John Tierney describe it as one of two consistent traits in people who have positive life outcomes-the other being intelligence.[80]
Their book catalogues experiments in which partic.i.p.ants who complete a task involving their will (like resisting fresh cookies) struggle to complete completely unrelated tasks (like solving a geometric puzzle) later. Resisting a candy bar may weaken your resolve in a high-pressure sales environment like buying a car.
Willpower is part of what cognitive scientists call executive function. And executive function can be trained. Exercise is a healthy diet"s most important partner. I view attention, the conscious kind of focus that we all desire to be more productive, as a form of athleticism. Like running a marathon, our ability to focus depends as much on our will as it does our natural ability.
If we are training our brains to shorten our attention spans and tune in to the cacophony of distractions around us, then we must certainly be able to train it to do the opposite, and strengthen it the other way around.
Over the past few years, I"ve developed a framework for myself that has helped me increase my attention span. It"s geared towards people who spend most of their work time behind computer screens, but the theory can be applied to all kinds of careers, and it doesn"t need to be tied to work at all. It"s simply a system for measuring and lengthening your attention span. What you pay attention to is a completely different matter.
[79] [80] There are obviously other factors that go into success and happiness. But these two are relatively constant from person to person..
Measurement.
If will is a trait, like intelligence, that improves our lives, and it"s an exhaustible resource, then we have to think of our attention like a currency. Our language is well-suited for this already-we don"t "burn" attention, we usually "pay" it, and often times, like the federal budget, it has deficits. Our attention is the currency that marketers l.u.s.t for, and it"s about time we started guarding it, consciously, like we guard our bank accounts.
Nothing can be increased if it first cannot be measured. In order to track your progress, the foundation of our system relies upon good, practical measurement. We need software that can measure how we"re using our computers and what we"re focused on. Fortunately enough, there"s great software for this called RescueTime, and it"s available for the Mac or the PC. You can find it by visiting RescueTime.com or by visiting the resources section of InformationDiet.com.
RescueTime sits in the background, whenever you"re using your desktop, and tracks what you pay attention to. It"s a silent, impartial judge that watches every website you visit, and every window you have open on your desktop, and measures how productive you are.
During your first week using RescueTime, log in to the RescueTime website frequently to fine-tune the software. You can set up lists of websites that are healthy and necessary for you to do your job and part of your ongoing set of work, and other websites that are distractions.
Be strict with yourself: if you"ve found yourself constantly clicking the refresh b.u.t.ton in your web-based email client, go ahead and mark email as antiproductive for you. Same goes with the news sites and blogs that you read. If you"re an overshopper, make sure RescueTime knows that Amazon.com is bad for you.
Every week, RescueTime will send you an email giving you a productivity score, and comparing your productivity to that of the entire RescueTime community. What we want to do now is make this number go up.
Elimination.
After you"ve set up RescueTime to measure your progress, you need to take a hard look at your computer and start eliminating the things that are distractions. You want to move yourself from a reactive model of computing, where you"re constantly being tugged and pulled in every direction and responding to every notification that comes across your screen, into a conscious model, where you"re in complete control of what you"re paying attention to.
Take a look at your works.p.a.ce, and silence everything that"s set up to notify you of anything. Silence your phone, put it on vibrate, and put it on something soft so that you can"t hear it when you"re working.
Take a look in the "system tray" of your computer-either that spot near the bottom where your clock is on Windows, or that spot near the top on your Mac. If any of those little icons there (besides the clock) change color, create little cartoon bubbles, or otherwise generate notifications, get rid of them.
Close down your desktop Twitter client, and shut off your instant messages. Change your Outlook preferences to only receive new messages when you click the send and receive b.u.t.ton.
One way to do this in modern operating systems is to create a new user account on the same computer you use, but without access to all the software that keeps you distracted. That"s how I"ve set myself up-I have one user called "Work" and another called "Play." This gives me a container that I can put my mindless web surfing habits into, and another kept free from distraction.
Turning these interruption technologies off isn"t enough, though. You"ll also need to arm your web browser with tools to help eliminate distractions while you"re trying to surf the Web. You can"t very well be expected to accomplish a Google search for valuable information when, if you"re a member of Google"s social network, Google+, there"s a bright red notification bar sitting there waiting to be clicked on.
Fortunately, there"s a browser extension for Google Chrome and Firefox to rid you of many of the Web"s distractions. On InformationDiet.com, I"ve catalogued many of them for you-but I"m certain I"m not going to be able to keep up with the ever-expanding universe of interruption technology. So here"s a simple rule of thumb to live by: if it has a number by it, eliminate it.
Let"s go ahead and get rid of those advertis.e.m.e.nts on the Web. Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer all have extensions that will do their best to block advertis.e.m.e.nts. Though they"re not perfect-and they"re very much an arms race against advertising-based content providers-they work well enough, and the overall reduction in exposure to advertising is probably good for your head and your bank account.
Lastly, let"s take care of your inbox. While, yes, you probably get a lot of important email, you probably get a lot of email that"s not important too. Software can fairly easily tell the differences between these two things, and save the stuff that"s not important for consumption later on.
Google has a tool for this in Gmail called Priority Inbox, but my personal favorite is called Sanebox.com. It works on most major email providers, and doesn"t just mark what email is important-it actually takes the email that"s not important, and dismisses it from your inbox into another folder. This way, the temptation isn"t even there. Don"t worry about missing anything. Close to the end of every working day, you"ll get an email digest of all the emails Sanebox put into your "Later" folder so that you can go back and check to see what you missed.
I remember when I did this for myself the first time. The only thing I can liken it to is the first time I put on a pair of prescription eyegla.s.ses. I didn"t know my eyes and brain were straining to see things, but once the gla.s.ses were on, I could feel half the muscles in my face relax. It was a wondrous moment. It felt clean.
Sadly, it doesn"t last long. After about five minutes, curiosity will kick in, and you"ll start wondering what"s going on in the world. You might start to panic. "What if there"s an important email, or even a not so important but very ba.n.a.l and uninteresting email that"s waiting for you in your inbox?" your inner voice might say.
Let this inner voice yammer all it wants, and treat it as though a crazy person has been locked inside your head. After a few days of working with Sanebox, I found myself questioning my very own significance: I was getting so much less email that I began to a.s.sume people didn"t like me anymore. I found myself trawling through my Sanebox unimportant emails hoping that I"d missed some important email. My ego was wounded based on the sheer reduction in volume of email.
Now perhaps your ego isn"t as fragile as mine, but I think that"s the same voice that tells c.o.ke addicts to do more c.o.ke, and smokers to smoke more cigarettes. It"s at best the voice of compulsion and at worst the voice of addiction. You"re going to have to stop listening to it. It"s going to take hard work, and a lot of strength, but you can do it. You just have to be pragmatic about it and take it slow.
Training.
Watching the juggler jog backwards past me on the 16th mile, or the man towing his fully grown but clearly incapacitated son behind him on the 24th, was enough for me to understand that I probably wasn"t going to ever be a world-cla.s.s athlete. Though my wife looks like Indiana Jones trying to escape the giant boulder of "Clay"[81] behind her in our finish line photo, I"m still happy to have accomplished the feat.
I recommend that everyone in the world train for at least one marathon in their lives: it"s a testament to what your body can do if you train appropriately. It"s also a reminder that training takes a long time-training for that 26.2-mile race took six months-and a lot of small, slow steps to get there. For those of us that aren"t world-cla.s.s runners, marathon training is, above all else, a test of will.
To train for my first marathon, I used Jeff Galloway"s "run-walk" method: it meant running for a certain length of time, then taking a shorter walk break. Over time, the goal is to lengthen the running time, and shorten the break time.
This method works for running for a few reasons. It allows you to go at your own pace and acknowledges that some people don"t train for marathons in order to win them, but rather to complete them. It allows you to expend your energy based on your level of exertion, rather than on distance. Finally, it creates a framework that is growable and tunable to you as you grow.
We"re going to use a similar method for strengthening your attention span. In order to do it, you"re first going to need a good timer. You can buy a runner"s stopwatch that has an interval timer if you want, or-if you want to be less annoying at work-you can download some software to do it on your desktop. Any old desktop timer will work, but interval timers work best. This will be the one notification you"re allowed to have.
Before you really get started with this technique, I want you to promise to be forgiving with yourself. Failure at this doesn"t mean you"re a bad person, or that somehow you"re not competent-it probably just means you bit off more than you could chew. Take it slow and find a pace for you. The thing that got my 240-pound self (after dropping 40 pounds during training) across a marathon finish line was this thought: "I"m not going to win this marathon. My goal is to not come in last."
Now, we"re going to start off slow. Try working in five minute intervals, with a one minute break in which you can do anything-check Facebook, deal with Twitter, or check your phone for text messages-anything you want, except check your email (we"ll get to that in a minute). In one hour, try working like this five times, then pause your timer. Get up and stretch or use the restroom for one to two minutes. Remember, sitting kills you.
Once back at your desk, do another three repet.i.tions of the cycle. By this time, you should have about 10 more minutes left in your hour. Check your email, and respond to the things that you need to respond to.
Now sometimes this won"t work for you-you may want to pay more attention for longer spurts of time. That"s fine; this is a framework, not a set of laws. These rules needn"t apply all the time. But I will caution you-you"re training for endurance, not short bursts of speed. Usain Bolt might be the fastest man in the world at the 100-yard dash, but it"s unlikely that will do him much good in a marathon.
It"s likely your mind will beg for you to work on a problem for longer than five minutes. In some cases it might be right, but stick with the program if you can. Even experienced marathon runners often run less distance than they can, so that they can train up for speed and better endurance; similarly, we"re starting off at five minutes to make it easy on you-you need to get used to this pattern of working more than anything else.
So if you"re working on complex problems, and feel that you must work longer than five-minute intervals, initially, then do it. But for a few hours, or even a solid day, give the 5:1 setting a shot. You might find that you get more minutes out of your day in the long term that way. Remember, we"re starting off easy so that you don"t get discouraged.
After you"ve got the 5:1 thing down, it"s time to start increasing your attention span. In your first week, gradually turn up the number of work minutes in 15-second intervals. By day four, try to get up to about seven minutes. Remember to split your intervals up-in any given 60-minute set, you"re going to need at least 2 minutes to stretch and about 10 minutes to deal with email.
As not all numbers divide into 48 evenly, these stretch moments and email moments are going to need pliable time limits. Do what you think is best, but if you have to err, err to the side of rest, not to the side of work.
By day 10, try for a 10-minute work interval to a 2-minute rest interval. A 10:2 interval may seem vastly inferior to a 9:1 interval. It"s more than 60% less efficient to spend two minutes resting for every minute working as it is one for every nine. But remember, what we"re trying to do here is to lengthen your attention span. At 10 minutes, we begin to get to the usual standard of our attention span length.
Continue growing your work time as you see fit, at increments that are shorter than noticeable. Do only 15- to 30-second increases, never more than once a day, and try not to go longer than 15 minutes without a small stretch break, at least. Remember: we"re building a healthy lifestyle for you.
For this book, I worked in 15-minute work intervals with 2-minute breaks three times an hour, and a 9-minute email check at the end of every hour. I stretched, used the restroom, or otherwise didn"t look at the screen for the full two minutes, I found this helped my mind reflect and decompress, so that I could get back to writing. Sometimes those two-minute breaks turned into five-minute breaks; sometimes those 15-minute work spans turned into 20-minute ones-I"m not a stickler for time anymore.
I also did only four hours in a row of this focused task work at a time, followed by at least an hour break that was entirely away from the computer screen. I tried to schedule my day so that I accomplished all the task-oriented computer work I needed to accomplish by noon, then I could take an hour for lunch. If I had meetings in any given day, they were scheduled for after lunch and if at all possible, back-to-back and directly after lunch. If my schedule allowed, then I was back at it after the meetings were over.
It"s worth noting that I"ve started to apply this same technique to other things that require my concentration. Reading on the iPad, for instance, is tough for me because my email is just a tap or two away. In order to make a successful journey through a book, even for leisure, I"ve got to apply the same technique. The technique is about focus and concentration, not necessarily about getting work done.
The other good thing about this method is that it forces us to consciously measure the time we spend working on a computer. By building in the interval metronome, we become keenly aware of how much time has gone by, and how much time we have left to get done what we need to get done. No longer will you look up and wonder where the day went. You"ve used your executive function and accounted for it.
Finally, remember that you"re measuring your success. We set up RescueTime for a reason: to make sure that what you were doing works for you. Make sure, after a week or two of doing this, that your productivity number is headed in the right direction, and that it stays that way.
All our brains and minds are unique, and though this works for me, it may not work for you. If it"s the case that this system isn"t working for you, then it"s an opportunity for creativity. I encourage you to invent your own system for training out your attention span-and share it with us on InformationDiet.com.
[81] I am so sorry for that pun. Remember, a healthy information diet is about having a sense of humor!
Distractibility Can Be Good.
It turns out that constant focus isn"t all that great, and that allowing a bit of distractibility into our lifestyles can have some benefit. Several academic studies now show that surfing the Web mindlessly, for brief periods of time, can have restorative cognitive properties[82]-much more so than things with a high cognitive load like managing email. Focus on building your attention span, but don"t forget to give yourself some breaks. Just make sure they"re set to certain limits. Spending all day focused entirely on your work is bound to be exhausting.
[82] 9. A Healthy Sense of Humor.
"A merry heart doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones."
-Proverbs 17:22.
We could all stand to be a little more like Karl Rove in Washington. I met him once at a politics and technology event here in Washington, D.C. He glanced down at my attendee badge, saw the company name on it, and exclaimed: "Blue State Digital! You guys do great things for the wrong people!"
I responded: "Another half-truth from Karl Rove."
He laughed, told me how he would have beaten Howard Dean in 2004, and asked for my business card.
Three days later, I walked into my office to find a handwritten letter with a lot of strange stamps on it. It was a letter from my c.o.c.ktail companion and renowned philatelist. The letter said: "Dear Mr. Johnson, It was a pleasure meeting you at the Yahoo! Citizens 2.0 Conference. Best of luck with the business, but only up to a point!
If you"d like to have the picture you took of me inscribed, please send it over and I"ll sign it for you and send it back. If not, please accept this letter as a souvenir. Now you can show your liberal friends that you met the great Satan himself.
Sincerely, Karl Rove"
Over the course of a few weeks, I found myself developing a pen pal in Rove. He and I exchanged a few letters-he romanticized "pushing atoms back and forth"-and I thanked him for helping us raise all that money for MoveOn.org. (Though I must admit, my interface with the United States Postal Service isn"t what it ought to be.) It struck me that Rove, arguably one of the most successful political architects in history, was not only funny, but he was also keenly aware and capable of poking fun at himself.
Left-of-center people may find this atrocious. Here"s a man who helped architect George W. Bush"s political strategy for eight years. Known as "Bush"s Brain," he"s often thought of by millions of people as one of the most evil spinmasters that ever existed-alongside d.i.c.k Cheney, and Bush himself, Rove is thought of by the left as the puppeteer behind the administration that led us through the Iraq war, the botched Katrina efforts, the housing bubble, and the banking system"s meltdown.
And here he was, in a courteous and handwritten note, being hilarious though downright glib about the whole thing. In Rove"s defense-he wasn"t making fun of those things that the left has him tied up in. He was making fun of himself.
Rove has a sense of humor because he has to, and he probably understands the same thing I"ve learned in the past few years of working on issues that I deeply care about and things that appear, to me at least, to be vital to our condition.