Attention is now one of the most important currencies. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not here to sing the praises of a brave new world where attention takes the place of filthy lucre and we all live happily ever after. Yet, in our information-based economy, it’s only natural that our individual attention does stand out as a leading actor in every process of our social and private lives.
English language clearly frames this: you pay attention (we Italians are a bit more cautious and prefer to just lend it) and you spend time (we have the superpower to get it back here in The Land of Pasta, as we just pass it). It’s crucial to understand that this monetary analogy is not just a metaphor: our attention is limited, just like our time and our money are. Every time we decide to spend it, we’re giving away a portion of our daily quota to receive a certain payoff. Every transaction - attentional switch - we conclude, we have to pay a fee for it: just like with a POS machine, we have to pay for the act itself of paying. And it’s not over yet: the more we spend of our reserve, the more deteriorated will our attentional performance be. We have to keep paying even when we’re finally fully focused on our task; the lower our funds, the lower the rate at which we can keep spending it. The output decreases and so does the payoff.
The results of misplaced attentional resources are then a consistent expenditure leading to a poor income, plus a deteriorating well being - or a growing anxiety. Seems like a definitely lose-lose deal.
Good news is neuroscience came to our help with some simple, yet not banal, tips to improve our management of our new-found currency. Since we are convinced that avoiding silliness is way more effective than chasing cleverness, we decided to begin with three mistakes to quit right away for a more functional allocation of our neuro chemical funds.
Mistake #1: Multitasking and Task-Hopping
We all experienced that feeling of efficiency, prowess and performance (and exhaustion, for the most honest ones) that comes from dealing with multiple sources of troubles in the same time unit. Emails to be replied, phones to answered, texts to be sent, keynotes to be completed, reports to be reviewed, bosses to be pleased (I know: your one is really the best one). It’s a common, understandable mistake: if one does more things, more stuff will get done and productivity will rise. Elementary cause-effect logic. Sorry, it doesn’t work like that. It’s the exact opposite, indeed.
As neuroscientist Daniel Levitin magnificently explains in The Organized Mind, the best expense-gain ratio is achieved when sticking to one and only task and devoting it all our attention until completion. See? It’s not a matter of quality, it’s actually of mere quantity that we’re talking about: we want to reduce payment fees coming from transactions by keeping them as limited in number as possible.
Now, our friend Organization will come and lend us a helping hand on this. We need to actively sort trough our daily task before we start working on them, assigning them to four categories: do it right away, do it when able, do it when you prefer, skip. You can’t imagine how calming is the underlying awareness that you’re doing the most important, pivotal thing you need to do. It will free your mind to unlock its focus capabilities and fully devote it to the task at hand, which you will face with both your efficiency and your well being (if the concept can cohabit with working) at their best. This major switch in attentional set-up is further enhanced by the consequent eradication of doubt. Maybe I’d better do this, maybe I’d better sort that out… merely eliminating this mind short-circuit will provide your mind with an exceptional boost, which leads us to the next point.
Mistake #2: Keeping a Cluttered Mind
The task-sticking thing we just discussed is directly linked with the amount of thoughts affecting your mind. Remember that attention comes in two ways: inward and outward. Thinking is indeed an action in all respects and, as such, it requires attention. When misplaced, thinking degenerates into his evil twin Over Thinking, one of the most prominent plagues of our time. And now we’re back on the starting point: sticking to a task and fragmenting attention are two mutually exclusive conditions. And here’s a corollary to this: you can either think or do.
We’ve just seen how classifying your tasks by urgency takes one important class of harassing thoughts away. We need to expand this effect in order to silent other classes of intrusive thoughts. You’ll be surprised to know how harmless and innocent can parasite thoughts look. Locating your keys and wallet, getting to the needed file (both physically and digitally), remembering a procedure, a password, a date, or remembering where did you write it down, all drain your attentional resources. Every time you deal with this kind of problems - they are actual problems for your mind, even it sounds over stated - you pay the switching fee, then pay (pronounce “waste”) further attention in the frantic search for the lost keys, and pay another fee to transition to the original task. You’re finally back on it, tired, stressed up and with a now reduced amount of time to do it. You start to feel pressure and anxiety rising, other intrusive thoughts claim their share of attention (it’s a great business opportunity for them), and the loop goes on.
The solution to this is pretty simple: don’t use your brain to store futile informations. The location of personal items, work related documents and/or tools and any other thing you may need is not worth your attention. Decluttering your workspace and your home brings a great sensation of relief because it'a way to declutter your very mind. It’s not a Sheldon Cooper like compulsion to order we’re talking about: it’s a matter of real purification, of off-loading the mind of unnecessary burdens. Would you play a soccer match with a backpack full of bricks on? Then why should you work with a mind full of clutter?
Accessories like key holders, desk organizers or charging stations are meant for this: externalizing information you don’t need to keep in your mind. Again, a clutter free mind, interacting with a clutter free environment, is key.
The same goes, of course, with volatile things: notes, procedures and practices, passwords, dates: externalize. Calendars, apps for notes, password keeping services: technology does do good things. Let’s use them.
Mistake #3: Not Taking Breaks
Mental activity is about consuming energy, exactly in the same way of physical activity. Some of us are accustomed to finely paced alternation of rest and effort in sports: we progressively push our bodies to peak performance, keep it for a while and pause, reiterating the process for the whole session. It is impossible to run at full performance forever: our chemical energy does not work like fuel, it can’t just flow at full throttle until exhaustion. We need to give our bodies a brake so that it can collect remaining energies and set them ready for use. So with sports, so with mind - our brain is an organ like everyone else.
Organization comes to help us again: our best course will be to arrange a well planned alternation of work and rest, leveraging the output we can get from each peak session with the amount of peak sessions we are able to perform. We need to balance this interacting parameters in order to tune ourselves into the most efficient performance.
A widely used technique is the Pomodoro, which consists in alternating 25 minutes of absolute focus with 5 minutes of total leisure. A 15 minutes break comes as a reward after a 2 hours long cycle. You can enact this technique with the timer app on your phone, but there are plenty of apps designed to fully automate the process, most of them can even turn off notifications during focus time. Solutions like this come with a very nice side-effect: you don’t have to worry to even set the timer at each session mark, as the alteration pattern is already set in the app.
Are you smelling the magic word? Exactly: externalize!