Attention Ledger
Are we wrong about attention spans?
This is a challenging topic and goes hand in hand with the time ledger I wrote about a few weeks back.
We are bombarded with the messaging that attention spans have dropped and the latest generation sucks because they can’t keep focus. The metrics used are something like time spent on a thing or average video length. I THINK THIS IS WRONG!
Here is a really interesting deep dive into how little research there actually is.
It is true we divide our attention into more buckets because there are more available.
I am fairly certain if everything we have now existed when boomers or any generation were kids, the same things would have been said!
Obviously, I can’t prove this unless you have a time machine. I would be happy to take it, test this theory, and buy a bunch of Apple and Google stock along the way.
Back to the premise. We don’t have an attention span problem. We have a curiosity, time constraint, and gaslighting problem. I realize two of the three are bad and our curiosity is actually a good thing. Curiosity with time constraints becomes a “problem”.
We have a confusing relationship with brevity. In school, we are taught to write papers and given length requirements. I don’t actually know why. Probably some kind of control mechanism. If you can write all you need in one page, why are we forced to hit some multipage minimum?
Torture? probably.
What do we end up learning in school? To write with as much fluff and filler as we possibly can to hit that minimum.
After we leave school we learn that time is scarce and no one wants your filler words. They want brevity and concisely written emails. We have to unlearn all our writing habits.
This took me years early in my career to get my writing where I removed as much fluff as possible. Everything I write has a purpose, whether it’s for knowledge or to make you laugh.
Therefore this is my first point, once you get into the real world people want you to be short in your expression. They want to be able to get what they need and get out ASAP. That’s why most things could be short emails instead of meetings.
We are also at a time when we have almost everything at our fingertips. It is exposing that learning in school is not the same as learning in the real world. We have access to learn about history, space, robots, gardening, cars, human psychology, etc without needing to read massive amounts of text. We don’t have to follow rules. There are some really interesting videos 5-10 minutes in length that are probably more dense than a full semester in school.
This is why it appears we can’t pay attention. We jump from thing to thing and it appears we don’t have focus. Appears is the keyword here.
What if I reframe this? It’s not that we can’t focus, it’s that we figured out there are so many cool things to learn about and interact with. We realized if we didn’t start condensing we would barely be able to scratch the surface of things we want to know.
I have a full-time job, friends to catch up with, and a family. Time is not on my side. I also love learning. I love taking my rose-colored glasses off and finding out how all aspects of our world works. How am I supposed to do this if I had to watch a 3,927,784 minute Ken Burns docs to hear about the Civil War. For the record, Ken Burns is awesome, just really long documentaries lol. This one is almost 12 hours.
Again, don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with watching these! However, I think time is scarce, more now than ever and people are more curious than ever. It is easier to learn about anything and in that, you need to figure out how to ledger your time!
This is why I said curiosity plus time constraints is the issue. Before the internet and smartphones, access to this information was not easy. The place to get things was books and newspapers. Isn’t reading a newspaper like scrolling through any news site or even Twitter at times? It’s chunks of info on different topics. It’s 1 large paper and 50 different stories. Yet somehow I feel I would get pushback saying it’s the same thing.
This is where the gaslighting comes in. Since this new information consumption is different, it is seen as worse. STOP IT. The metrics are wrong. Time spent reading newspaper - 2 hours. Time spent on each story - 5 minutes. Call the 2 hours watching short videos a virtual newspaper and there ya go. I HAVE A GOOD ATTENTION SPAN.
We are naturally curious and want to understand the world in breath instead of depth. I want to know how the robot works and don’t need to know enough to build my own. Annie Duke makes a great point in this video where we can only know things we have encountered. We now have access to more knowledge and are not given more time so we must figure out how to learn faster.
There is an excellent book ‘Range’ about understanding things outside your main knowledge area and how it can help you think differently. If a data analyst learned about cooking, could that help them solve a problem?
Back to time vs curiosity. If I have limited time and there is a place where I can learn something, whether it’s traditional science or people's experiences around the world, I am going to take it.
For example, look at what you can learn in 60 seconds. I am sure this could be recreated in a 10-minute video but why? It’s possible this inspires you in a completely unintended way. You could even bring this up in a conversation with a colleague and it inspires them!
Ok, that was weird, how about this one?
We have talked about imposter syndrome here before. However, you can also get a great primer from this short video.
Was the purpose to feel validated? Great! You got that in 60 seconds.
Does it spark curiosity into something you didn’t know existed and now will be more well-rounded for it? Also great!
I understand there is a dark side. Lots of bad people put bad content that sucks you in. Doom scrolling is a real thing. There are mental health risks with the internet, social media, etc.
My final point is this. It may not be that we don’t have good attention spans anymore. If this were true nothing would get done by anyone. We have just found out there is so much we can learn and explore.
Did I oversimplify things? Probably
I kind of have to… remember you have no attention span. Everyone says it so it must be true! (if you can’t feel the sarcasm oozing out of that… I don’t know what to tell you).
A general theme in my blogs is we frame things poorly. This is another instance where we need to take a step back. It’s not helpful to say “kid these days”. As I said earlier, any generation existing today would be the same.
What if we as a people start framing and focusing on the positives in things? We know there are negatives. However, what if that is just not the main story?
Until next time…
Learn something new!