Serial Entreprenuer | Chairman of the Board, Scanta | Co-Founder, Moment | Senator, G20 Summit.
Attention is fundamental to our performance. However, according to multiple indicators, attention is in steady decline.
It would be easy to simply blame the obvious 24/7 intrusion of mobile platforms into our daily lives. After all, clicks, downloads, likes, views, followers and shares have become a new currency of both social interaction and our digital economy. Platforms like TikTok offer bite-sized content that is easy to consume while automatically recommending similar content and even automatically starting to play similar videos—limiting the possibility of interruptions.
This doesn’t just apply to our teenagers following clickbait and TL;DR culture. A 2014 Pew Research Center survey found that 77% of employees use social media while on the job. While AI has exacerbated this trend by turning human attention into advertising revenue for decades, the latest evolution of generative AI is expected to exponentially accelerate the rate and efficacy of content seeking our attention.
Researchers in Turkey discovered that declines in attention in adolescents are highly correlated with decreases in sleep quality, self-esteem and productivity as well as with increases in loneliness, apathy, narcissism, anxiety and depression. Studies like this generally find what’s referred to as “multi-directional causation”; these things are so tightly linked that changes in each one will affect the others.
In this way, declining attention does not just risk our ability to focus and perform but also the quality and longevity of our lives and our children’s lives. It has transformed from being a necessary evil of our digital age into an existential crisis for ourselves, our families and our communities.
Rather than acquiesce, business leaders can choose a different approach to the rising demands that we face each day.
First, it is important to understand how our attention works through three primary attentional states:
1. Focus State: This is what most people call “paying attention.” It is a state of controlled application of your attention to complete a specific task or sequence of tasks while selectively scanning for, attending to or inhibiting various internal and external stimuli.
2. Mindful State: This is a state of sustaining attention to present-moment experiences while inhibiting irrelevant external stimuli and dismissing tangential paths without emotional reaction and judgment. Meditation can not only temporarily enhance the ability to maintain a focus state and general mental health, but it can also reconfigure the whole-brain network architecture for long-term attentional benefits.
3. Distractable State: This is a state of constant attentional interruption characterized by vulnerability to inappropriate and irrelevant stimuli that attempt to draw attention away from the task at hand.
With this summary in mind, consider these suggestions business leaders can use to navigate the attention crisis.
1. Exercise your focus. Try setting a timer for five minutes and focus completely on a specific task you want to finish. Then take a two-minute break before resuming for another five minutes. The next day, add another five minutes to your focus sessions, with two more minutes of rest in between.
When my team employs this strategy, using dedicated focus timers (not phone timers) and building up the stamina to work for longer chunks of time, we not only see an increased output of work but also heightened creativity and quality. We found that this is an extremely easy approach to “work out” the brain and make it more focused in the long run.
2. Recharge your neural networks. Sleep is a critical component of recharging the brain, but so are mindfulness-habituating practices like meditation or taking walks in nature. In order to develop and sustain a focus state, it is necessary to balance that effortful work with a mindful state every day.
At my office, we encourage our team to use mindfulness apps and take at least two 10-minute breaks where they can sit down and recharge. We found that this makes an astounding difference for many of our employees; they come back refreshed and ready to tackle their next projects, and it’s easy to convince employees to opt into this when they feel a profound impact from the mindful pause in their bustling days.
3. Evolve your digital habits. Set a timer in advance when entering a platform that is addictive for you. Try watching one video only and then selecting the next one in a totally different domain. Find ways to reduce the similarity and repetitiveness of the content you are consuming.
While it can be difficult to enforce any limit to digital/social media time in the office, the best way to create a culture like this starts with you. I was able to curb my digital addiction by deleting phone apps and only accessing social media on a laptop. This way, I choose when I scroll. You’d be surprised how many employees are eager to follow suit.
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