Part 7 (1/2)

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] /reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer [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.