Some topics I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about lately are focus and attention span. I believe the world we are building is antithetical to focusing and shortens our attention spans. Our lives have become a constant blast of notifications, information, and communication. We have to always be connected but it’s easy to go through a day without consuming anything larger than bite-sized. Even scarier, one can go through a day without having to have a thought larger than bite-sized.
The tools we have chosen to use to build businesses and relationships are ones which both give us small chunks of information and also only ask us to provide small thoughts. Two examples from different spheres of life are Twitter and Slack. Twitter intentionally limits how many characters you can put in a tweet. That restriction has changed how we communicate. Not just on Twitter. Outside of it too. I think a restriction on characters doesn’t just encourage short messages though. It encourages short thoughts. It’s hard to express large thoughts in a short message, even if you can string a bunch of those messages together. I think it really changes how our thoughts come together. On the other side of it, consuming Twitter means you only are given short thoughts to interact with. There’s not much attention span required to read a tweet.
It’s not just that we think and read short things that has made it so hard to focus though. I believe the other big factor is our always on connectivity. To me, nothing embodies this more than Slack. Slack is setup perfectly to demand constant connectivity from people. It drives notifications at them. You can @here channels and send a notification to who knows how many people. Everyone has a green dot so you can see if someones not present. As a platform it really encourages a style of communication that is immediate. If you miss a conversation in a Slack channel you can’t contribute to it later. You may even be interrupted in the middle of your thoughts so if you start typing messages you better keep typing until you’ve finished all of them. This trains us to think one line at a time and there’s not much worse for building focus skills than that.
I don’t mean to suggest these problems are exclusively due to Slack and Twitter or these platforms don’t do some good. I just find them to be interesting case studies. I think it’s important to study them. There’s a war on to capture our attention and I believe it’s counterproductive to the goals most of us have in life. What I want requires focus to build and the ability to think deep thoughts. I don't think I’m unique in that way. I also do not think I’m unique in that I cannot focus as long as I would like to. I feel like I’ve gotten worse over time and I think learning to focus again is the biggest advantage a person or business can have. Being focused and having a long attention span is now a scarce skill and the world is making it harder. I believe moving against that current is now a competitive advantage.
If you agree with that sentiment or find it interesting I’d highly recommend some of the following resources. Signal v. Noise has some great posts on the ideas of focus such as Is Group Chat Making You Sweat and The Presence Prison. Cal Newport’s book Deep Work lays out a good case that the inability to perform deep work is bad for business and also proposes some great techniques for learning how to go deep.