Managing Your Attention

Our modern digital era has caused a fundamental shift in how we think and work, and in how we focus our attention and achieve fulfillment. The technology we use on an everyday basis, our cultural and social environments, and our individual human nature together make it hard to focus. We now need a new paradigm for understanding how to keep ourselves happy, productive and fulfilled.

– Gloria Mark

We live in an age where all of the world’s information is at our fingertips. In a moment I can look up information on any possible question in my mind. This is an amazing technological feat and one that still boggles my mind. However, there is a downside. We get caught up in these rabbit holes of information searching for meaningless information while not paying attention to the people we love. It is critical in these times to be aware and conscious of how we want to use our attention towards the things that truly bring us fulfillment.

Allowing attention to be pushed around by technological distractions can lead to feeling exhausted, or worse, burned out. It is important to take control of your attention to insure that at the end of the day you have the resources you need to be in a healthy state of mind with the people you care about. So how can you work on managing your attention? Let’s look at the whole picture first.

Constant Distraction

It begins in the morning. You wake up and immediately pick up your phone, checking your texts, email and social media. You read through a complex article about major events happening in the world. You click over to the highlights of your favorite sports team. All of this in the first half hour of your day.

As the day unfolds you are responding to the stream of notifications coming from your phone via text and social media. You are in a constant state of engaging what your phone wants you to pay attention to. In this state of “chaos” managing your attention can be incredibly difficult.

At work you are being pinged via email and texts about meetings, things to do and struggling to focus on what you actually need to prepare for the day. In our world today the average person checks their email 77 times a day. This leads to our attention being pulled away every 6 minutes in an 8 hour day. People are on social media over two hours a day which is most likely a constant checking of the latest response to a post or update from a friend. People last on average about 47 seconds on a screen before they shift to another screen. As I write this I can feel the constant pull to look at something else on my laptop.

This lack of attentional focus is one of the deep challenges of the 21st century. It makes the ability to do deep work more and more difficult because we all are allowing the world around us to pull our attention away. This world of distraction that we live in leads to days where a lot of things are done but nothing gets accomplished. This means that more tasks are piled onto the next day creating more tension and stress. Often we all leave work feeling exhausted and overwhelmed knowing we will start the next day with the same amount to do. This creates a lot of dissatisfaction in how we live our lives. It doesn’t have to be like this.

We need to reengineer the information age day. This means setting up the day so that we don’t experience the cognitive overload many of us feel at the end of the day. Managing your attention and integrating cognitive breaks is a huge help.

Managing Cognitive Load

A long-standing, well-accepted theory in psychology, with over fifty years of research behind it, is that the mind has a general pool of attentional, or cognitive, resources that we use in our everyday functioning. These resources can be thought of as your attentional capacity, or rather, as the amount of attention you have available. (Mark, 2023)

Every morning you start your day with a limited amount of resources to use up in your mind. As we go through the day, in order to have a more satisfying work/life experience, it is important that we learn to manage this cognitive load. If you can work on managing your attention and do this successfully it can allow you to stay more engaged in your life.

Cognitive load is very simply the amount of thinking energy you have throughout the day. As you push yourself into complex processes this amount starts to wear down. The more complex, challenging creative work we do takes away from that day’s supply.

The basics of Cognitive Load Theory is when we take things from working memory to long-term memory, which allows us to keep things stored up. However, doing this requires a lot of energetic resources and leads to a decline in our thinking resources. What is needed is a break that allows for memory integration time so we can move on to the next complex task. This is crucial for managing your attention in an efficient and energy protecting way.

We can manage this by first coming to understand that it is important to have some thinking reserves at the end of the day. Most people are aware that they have certain times of the day where they feel more sluggish or less capable. This shows how our cognitive load depletes. When we see how we are more capable at different times we can keep our most challenging work for those times. Some people are most sharp at the beginning of the day while others are night owls doing their best work in the middle of the night.

These resources can be replenished by becoming more aware of how we lose our cognitive resources and how we can gain them back.

When you use sustained attention with difficult activities, then it creates a cognitive load, and we know from laboratory studies that you can’t keep sustained focus for too long, as your performance then starts to decline. (Mark, 2023)

Rote Attention Can Replenish

My own experience is that rote activity is a way to back off and replenish, and since I started studying our attention with our devices, I realize that it does relax and calm me. (Mark, 2023)

Rote attention is highly focused attention on something really easy. Often this is something that we have done over and over again. It isn’t necessarily doing something mindlessly but actually being engaged in a task that has been done so many times in the past you don’t have to work hard at it. It’s brushing your teeth but more interesting (although I do really like making sure my teeth are clean).

It may seem strange to talk about doing less engaged work in order to do more engaged work but it appears this is helpful. It’s like going for a run and at times you slow down to a walk in order to replenish yourself and then start running again. Rote activities seem to replenish one’s cognitive ability to do the higher level tasks. This is a wonderful way to work on managing your attention.

Knowing this means that you can weave these rote experiences into your day more consciously. It seems as though people will feel overloaded and suddenly switch to playing Candy Crush on their phone (not knowing why they do this). The problem with doing this compulsively (without intention) is that it may be hard to get back to the more complex tasks that need to be done.

One can organize their day to work on complex tasks for periods of time and then pull out of them several times a day to replenish the cerebral capacity to go back into a more complex task again. By keeping this organized one can continually be getting the more difficult tasks done and not allowing the rote tasks to take up too much time.

Examples can include simple video games that are not challenging but highly engaging. Home chores like vacuuming and ironing can also be good things to do to restore your cognitive load. A card game like solitaire can also be restorative because of how easy it is to do the task. During rote activity the mind will start to integrate different pieces of information and can actually lead to sudden creative breakthroughs. Many artists, theorists and other complex thought leaders often describe their big insights coming during rote activities. The mind needs to move into a lower gear to rest so that it can come back into a higher gear.

Focused attention is a kind of resource utilization, whereas rote activity and boredom require far fewer resources. While we may think of focus as an ideal state where one can be productive and creative, rote attention (and even boredom) are just as important and play critical roles in our well-being. (Mark, 2023)

Using Mindfulness As A Way Out Of Distraction

Being in control of your attention means first of all developing a conscious awareness of how you use it. (Mark, 2023)

The other helpful resource for managing your attention is the ability to be aware of what you are doing from moment to moment. Mindfulness allows us to notice our loss of focus and to manage what we are doing in the moment. If you are able to recognize yourself doom scrolling it may be a way of restoring your cognitive resources so you can go back to more complex processing. This is a good use of time, if, and this is a big if, you are able to find your way back to the complex task. When a task is causing significant discomfort due to its complexity our subconscious processes will often push into procrastination strategies rather than short periods of brain replenishment.

When we are in a mindful state and we are procrastinating or avoiding our more difficult tasks we can ask ourselves why. Why don’t we want to do something? What are we avoiding? These are the questions that can be helpful. It does require some element of noticing where your attention is going. If you unconsciously flow from one attentional distraction to the next you can’t really notice that there is a pattern of shunning some activity or project.

How Attention Impacts Our Relationships

…it’s not just that people feel stressed when they multitask and are exhausted, but they may convey these negative emotions to others. (Mark, 2023)

One of the big challenges of cognitive depletion is being with others. When we feel drained at the end of the day it can often become difficult to manage our emotions, connect with others and be our best selves.

People will often describe this by saying “I’m done,” or “the tank is empty.” When this is the case it is necessary to move towards some kind of rote activity or to head for bed in order to rebuild your brain resources.

When we aren’t aware of how sapped we are we might become grumpy or short with people. This kind of behavior puts stress on our relationships and makes it hard for people to be around us. The lack of cognitive resources is okay but it is important to have the ability to name it and bring it to your loved ones so they understand why you are having a hard time.

One thing that can be helpful also is to take a short break. I often encourage some of my clients to just take a rest for 20 or 30 minutes when they return home. This can often feel refreshing and they are able to regroup and be more engaged with their people.

It is important to note that when our capacity to engage relationally is low we might divert ourselves with our phones or other digital distractions. This often can alienate the people we love. I can think of times where I felt this mind exhaustion and would want to get on my phone. I can recall my sons saying, “daddy get off your phone.” What I was avoiding was the complexity of my familial relationships. My phone offers an easier place to put my focus. However, I do this compulsively rather than with clear awareness. If I can recognize this behavior I can acknowledge that I need a cognitive breather.

Instead of getting to this point it is better to have a plan to take a break when you end work so that you can feel more refreshed entering the space with your loved ones.

How This Shows Up In My Life

In my personal and professional life, I find where I put my attention to be one that really affects how I feel and how connected I am to others. I love to learn new things and whenever I have a free moment I’m often plugged into some podcast, audio book or another way of taking in information. I used to think this was such a gift to have the privilege to learn so many things.

I have begun to think that this way of using my attention is not helpful. I think this constant stream of information actually does tend to tax my cognition and lead me to feeling somewhat cranky and irritable later in the day.

There is a real value to just sitting and not having some stream of knowledge coursing into my consciousness. In the sitting my mind is given the space to integrate what I just digested. This integration is important and one of the things that I don’t believe we consider as part of our capacity to stay fresh and engaged in the present moment.

It seems like the same lesson that I am continually learning: slow down, be present and pay attention to what matters most, the people in my life. When I have a plan to be resourced throughout the day it is much easier to do this.