Where Does Your Attention Live?
I’ve been thinking a lot about attention.
It’s one of the most finite and unscalable resources we have. During any given second, we have the option of attending to various things in our vicinity, but every time we change what we attend to, we incur a cost.
By the time you switch from making eye contact and conversing with someone to checking your phone, to remembering what event or meeting you have coming up next, at least 1–3 seconds have gone by, and you don’t get those seconds back. Your attention has been spent, and you’re that much closer to the end of that day, that week, that year…
Attention isn’t static. It flows through time. It can be guided. It can be trained. It finds places where it likes to live. If it receives rewards, it will spend more time there. However, attention can quickly become insidious if we don’t learn how it operates and how outside forces may be manipulating it.
Attention is often tied to to our senses. Colors and moving images captivate visual attention. Try setting your phone to grayscale to get a sense of how much less stimulating it suddenly becomes. Strong flavors like fatty fried food captivate olfactory and gastronomic attention. Physical sensations like chronic pain can constantly ping our attention, wearing us down and leaving us constantly distracted.
Where does your attention live most of the day? First, think about the proportion of time your attention is focused internally vs externally. Internal attentional focus could take the form of mentally scanning how each part of your body feels, reflecting on the past, preparing for the future, etc. External attentional focus might look like reading, talking, walking, observing your surroundings, etc.
In recent years, our attention has also begun living in the cloud. The last few decades have ushered in entire digital worlds in which our attention can dwell. We offload memories onto Instagram, friendships in to chat platforms, and spare attention into screen-based games. New maladies like digital dementia are cropping up and wreaking havoc on our brains’ capacity to do basic things like remember and recall.
Now that you’ve considered where your attention might live, think of the things in your life that may capture the lion’s share of your attention. Is it a specific app (or category of apps) on your phone? Perhaps your attention lives in spreadsheets? In interpersonal conversation? In negative thought spirals and anxious rehashing of past events?
Let’s look at your phone again. In which apps does your attention live? Snapchat? Instagram? Facebook messenger? Apple recently added a feature called Screen Time so you can actually track where your digital attention flows each week. You may be surprised (or in my case, horrified) by how much of your attention is squandered away into apps that don’t actually add value to your life.
I had mentioned that physical sensations like pain can create attentional pings that prevent us from focusing and attending to the things we want to attend to, but I didn’t even get started on attentional pings from our phones, watches, and other digital sources.
Can you imagine my horror when I looked at the number of notifications I received per DAY last week?
These digital pings and notifications are oftentimes accompanied by physical sensations, like sounds, vibrations, and screens lighting up — potentially even across multiple devices at once. In this modern era, our attention is under constant strain.
Let’s take a look at a real world example: I’d bet that for most people who use online dating apps, more of their attention lives in texting/messaging than on any given dating apps they use. After all, people can have hundreds or thousands of Facebook friends, WhatsApp contacts, etc. with whome they correspond pretty regularly. What’s the probability that you’ll have someone’s full attention when messaging back and forth on a random dating app rather than transitioning to texting, where their attention may more naturally live each day?
In the workplace, imagine how much attention is required for someone to respond to an open-ended, non-urgent email that ends in a vague question that requires a lot of thought to respond to. It’s probably more attention than they care to dedicate to you, or to email in general. In an attentionally-divided world, brevity, conciseness, and clear calls-to-action are your friends.
Ok, so I lied before when I said that attention is unscalable. Attention can be packaged and scaled through habits! Habits are the result of repeated, focused attention, to the point where certain actions or thought processes become unconscious and reflexive.
Our capacity to devote our attention to forming habits that improve our lives is one of the greatest sources of agency and empowerment that we have as a species. It’s important to remember that habits are not strictly physical. Habits of thought and habits of emotion can be way more transformative in our lives.
Just as starting to save early for retirement allows people to relax and devote their time to other things later in life because that savings earned interest and compounded over time, so devoting your attention to habits of thought and emotion can create undeniably positive effects that compound over time as well.
One of my favorite habits that I developed during my teenage years was that of never talking about people behind their backs in a way that I wasn’t comfortable sharing with them to their faces. Anytime I felt the impulse to do so, I’d immediately set a time on my calendar to bring up my gripe/frustration with that person to their face, so that we could clear the air and identify actions steps to resolve the problem.
Ultimately, I believe that our greatest source of agency, happiness, and personal development resides in our capacity to first identify where our attention lives and then to cultivate our attention into habits that help us become the people we want to be.
For an insanely powerful guide to monitoring and understanding where your attention lives, read Juvoni Beckford’s Tools of the Time Manager guide, and if you want to map out a game plan for where to allocate your attention in the future, Juvoni also created a separate step by step process called, “You’re a rocket ship. This is how you blast off.”
If you’re really feeling the personal development vibes, and want to begin tackling the true art of lifecrafting, you’re in luck. Orian Marx literally created a free guide for how to do that.
