Lately, I’ve been wondering a lot about time management, my own sense of mortality, and then actually dealing with distractions and preserving my attention to what matters the most.
In our daily lives, we rely on essentials like food, money, and electricity. These keep us going. Attention, however, is different—it is, in fact, life itself. Our experience of being alive depends on what grabs our attention.
When researching the topic of the modern day attention span while working on my last project, Videomakers 101, I noticed a quite scary number – the average human attention span in 2022 was 8.25 seconds. Goldfish have an average attention span of 9 seconds, one second more than humans.
To tackle this, conventional wisdom advises becoming ‘indistractible.’ This often means adopting “relentless focus” habits, using tools like meditation, web blockers, expensive headphones, and more meditation. The aim: winning the battle for unwavering attention. However, this strategy can overlook a crucial truth about human limitations—our limited time and the need to use it wisely.
Having full control over our attention, however, seems quite impossible. Imagine a world where external forces couldn’t divert any of your attention. In such a sterile world, you’d miss the cues of oncoming buses or would practically never answer your phone. But this delicate balance isn’t just for emergencies; it’s what allows your attention to enjoy a beautiful sunset or be caught by a stranger across the room.
In his book, Burkeman mentions a really specific approach that social media loves using. It’s the common drag-down-to-refresh gesture, a simple action that’s become a puppet master in our scrolling habits. The idea behind it is this principle of “variable rewards,” when you can’t predict whether or not refreshing the screen will bring new posts to read, the uncertainty makes you more likely to keep trying again and again and again. You know who else does that? Slot machines.
The truth is – and honestly what scares me the most – is that distractions are often times way bigger than doomscrolling on social media – distractions can be unhealthy meals we take on our way home from the gym, friendships we don’t really cherish, or an unfilfilling job that drives us away from our greater goal.
This reminds me of one of the principles of evolution – we are hardwired to preserve our energy and lay low. We always aim to fufill a task with the least energetic requirement possible.
An article by Harvard Business review suggests noticing what distracts us the most and then finding the “Bigger Better Offer”. Because our brain chooses more rewarding behaviors, we need to identify behaviors that are more rewarding than our bad habits. And that sounds great in theory.
But how to we address this when it comes down to bigger situations on life?
Sources:
- “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman
- “Are You Stuck in the Anxiety-Distraction Feedback Loop?” by Jud Brewer, Harvard Business Review