I bet you can’t read this whole article

This article will require your attention.

For this reason, you probably won’t read it.

Or maybe you’ll start it, but our average time to stay on one task is now under a minute, so good luck!

Maybe you could skim it. Or ask an AI bot to summarize it. FYI, I actually wrote this thing. It’s not a product of AI. It’s crazy I feel the need to write that…

Even if you do read this, you will probably forget about it in a few hours. Like a wave of the sea that recedes after lapping your ankles with cool water, so your memory of these words will soon fade.

For it to be meaningful, you have to engage with it. Then, it has to engage with you. You have to sit with it and ruminate. You have to form connections to your own life. If you are like me, you need to socially and verbally process the information with friends.

In short, you have to slow down.

But who has the time for any of that? Your client’s emails are unanswered in the inbox. Your college friends just texted a political position and if you don’t respond, they will think you are apathetic to the highest concerns of the day. And don’t forget to pick up your kids from day care before they close.

This is the attention economy.

And you feel like you are going broke in it.

If I can borrow some attention, I’d like to talk about this dominant commercial milieu. Specifically, we’ll discuss

1. What it is
2. Why it matters
3. How to get it back

How the attention economy works

The term has academic origins dating back to the 1970s. In the 1990s, the global economy turned the corner from the dominant economic output being an economy of “things” (i.e., manufactured goods) to an economy of “knowledge.” In 1997, Michael Goldhaber, in the deliciously titled “The Attention Economy and the Net,” posited that the so-called “information age” was really an economy of attention.

The theory goes like this: You only have so much time in your life. What you pay attention to, therefore, is the currency of the highest value. Goldhaber called attention “the limiting factor; the bottleneck.” Comparing the attention economy with the material economy, Goldhaber said, “You most likely make many more decisions every day about where and towards whom your attention should now go than about where your or anyone else's money should go.”

This is new to human history, heretofore dominated by basic material concerns. The new economy has new rules. For example, in a material economy, you hire intellectual property lawyers to keep people from using your product without payment. In the attention economy, you welcome the proliferation and sharing on the internet because it allows you to build an audience for further attention extraction.

And so a Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian builds wealth not because of their paternal lineage, but because they mastered the ability to command, build and ultimately monetize followers’ attention.

This is somewhat intuitive. We have long used phrases like “pay attention,” demonstrating that focus is a type of currency. For currencies to have value, they need a limited supply. Indeed, attention is a non-renewable resource. You only get what you get. Hence, you get Netflix Founder, Reed Hastings, declaring, “Our biggest competitor is sleep.”

So every moment of your waking life is in competition with commercial and social forces to bid for your attention.

The result of this competition is that we are more distracted than ever.

Indeed, researchers have shown that in the last 20 years alone, our attention spans have dropped from an ability to hold a single task in focus for 2.5 minutes to a mere 45 seconds.

(If you have been struggling to stay focused on this article, maybe this just proves you need to read this?)

Why your lack of attention is a problem

Our attentional challenges are a problem for at least three reasons:

1. Our relationships suffer
2. Our work suffers
3. We find less meaning in our lives

We all know the experience of trying to hold a conversation with someone who is engaging with you and their phone simultaneously. You ask a simple question, only to wait for your interlocutor’s delay as their attention shifts from their phone input to the current human input in front of them.

A common sight is a couple or family, physically together but mentally separate on a couch, each immersed in their own devices, like planets orbiting the same physical location but whose consciousness is millions of miles away. (FYI, if this part hits, I recommend Sherry Turkle’s various works on the subject, including Reclaiming Conversation.)

In addition to relational challenges, our lack of attention is hurting us at work.

For some time, we have known that the skill of “multi-tasking" is a myth. Switching between tasks is like changing out a die in a CNC machine or some industrial equipment. Each switch takes time and hinders your overall productivity.

Similarly, there is a loss of efficiency when switching even between simple tasks.

Of course, if we have trouble focusing, we know our customers and prospects have the same problem. It’s very hard to sell our products in a distracted world (more on this later!). Our customers aren’t focused on what we are selling because they are the flotsam of the very waves of the economy we describe above. We can’t get their attention for long enough to make a dent and therefore our ROAS is rubbish.

Our lack of focus makes us personally less connected and professionally less productive.

Not surprisingly, the research also shows us that we find less meaning in our work because of this shift.

I am currently reading Cal Newport’s Deep Work. In it, he contrasts shallow work that requires quick input and output (think email or Slack messaging) with the titular deep work that requires extended concentration. The book makes the case not just that greatness is achieved by maximizing time in deep work, but that the work done by someone in this state is altogether more satisfying to a meaningful life.

He cites the work of science writer Winifred Gallagher, who discovered a relationship between attention and happiness following a personal cancer diagnosis. While the cancer was advanced and the treatment harrowing, she found that she could improve her life simply by focusing on all that was good in it. She describes, “movies, walks and a 6:30 martini” as examples of the “good.”

Gallagher writes resolutely, “This disease wanted to monopolize my attention, but as much as possible, I would focus on my life instead.” To buttress her personal observation, she cites the work of Barbara Fredrickson’s “Broaden and Build Theory,” that holds that our focus dictates our emotional well-being. While “look on the bright side” advice can seem saccharine or hollow, it turns out, at its core, is quite useful. Or as Gallagher says, “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.”

Newport then reminds us of the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose writings on what he called “Flow,” showed that people who were focused were more satisfied.

In short, if we choose deep, attentive work, we can be happier.

But the promise of a quick hit of dopamine, combined with the expectations of our work “culture”, " keeps us constantly checking our phones, inboxes and social accounts in search of the next high or the maintenance of the appearance of work over the thing itself.

But since we now know that deep work and concentration is more meaningful to us, let’s look at how we can get it back.

What you can do about it

If you want your attention back, you have to fight for it. It’s not going to be easy, but below are four tips. The first two are more personal and the second two relate to work production. They are:

1. Slow down and rewire your brain
2. Make hard things default and put obstacles in front of distractions
3. Simplify your objectives
4. Create focused customer encounters

Put life in slow-mo

The first step is one of the hardest, but also the most rewarding.

It involves doing things that cultivate a practice of deep observation.

As the kids say, “Go touch some grass.”

Seriously, when was the last time you walked in nature with the sole purpose of being and judgement-free observation?

The New York Times recently reported that walks in nature can increase attention spans by 20% versus control groups that stroll in urban areas. While the finding has been peer-reviewed and published, researchers are still not sure why walks in nature have this cognitive benefit.

My theory is that stillness and vastness drive you to notice small changes. I think nature even makes us better listeners because we are drawn to subtle changes in tone or subject that would fly over our heads without attentiveness.

Marcus Areleus saw this 2000 years ago. In Meditations, he describes how nature can draw us in to be more observational.

We should remember that even Nature’s inadvertence has its own charm, its own attractiveness. The way loaves of bread split open on top in the oven; the ridges are just byproducts of the baking, and yet pleasing, somehow: they rouse our appetite without our knowing why. Or how ripe figs begin to burst. And olives on the point of falling: the shadow of decay gives them a peculiar beauty. Stalks of wheat bending under their own weight. The furrowed brow of the lion. Flecks of foam on the boar’s mouth. And other things. If you look at them in isolation there’s nothing beautiful about them, and yet by supplementing nature they enrich it and draw us in. And anyone with a feeling for nature—a deeper sensitivity—will find it all gives pleasure. Even what seems inadvertent. He’ll find the jaws of live animals as beautiful as painted ones or sculptures. He’ll look calmly at the distinct beauty of old age in men, women, and at the loveliness of children. And other things like that will call out to him constantly—things unnoticed by others. Things seen only by those at home with Nature and its works.

“Things unnoticed by others,” there's the rub! To observe what others don’t see, will give you more appreciation for the subtle changes in your task and will dampen the appeal to constantly “change the channel.”

Other tricks for slowing down and observing?

Read poetry. Practice meditation. Both are concerned with observation, which should sharpen your focus.

The power of Nudge: Setting yourself up for better decisions

I heard an interview with someone who wanted to break their addiction to their phone.

Their solution?

Turn their smartphone into a glorified landline.

I’m old enough to remember going to the phone. It wasn’t in your pocket. It was attached to the wall.

So the person in the interview decided to keep their phone at their desk as a way of making it less available. If they wanted to use their phone, they would go sit in their office chair and do whatever they wanted to do. Then, when they got up, they left their phone behind!

Purposely or not, this life hack borrows from the work of Nobel Economist Richard Thaler, who captured the concept of “choice architecture” in his book, Nudge. The basic idea is to put roadblocks in front of choices you want to avoid and make the things you want to do easier. So, someone who wants to go running first thing in the morning might sleep in their workout gear. This makes running the default.

Similar hacks with the phone include locking it up. It’s not uncommon for comedy or music shows to ask patrons to lock their phones in Yondr pouches. If an audience member needs it back, they can step outside to get their phone unlocked. But most people just end up focusing on the art that they paid for.

Maybe offices using Yonder could become more productive?

Simplify objectives

When I’m overwhelmed, I try to come back to first principles.

When I find my mind wandering, I ask, “What am I paid to do? What does my job entail?”

This simple question allows me to remove all the activities that are superfluous to the result I am trying to achieve. As an entrepreneur, I wear several hats. So let’s say, I’m wearing the sales hat. Okay, what’s my job? My job is to bring in revenue. That’s it. It’s not to go to the conference or the networking meeting. My job is to bring in revenue. Are the tasks I am spending my time on leading to more revenue? Sales doesn’t require activity; it requires results.

When I keep that basic version of my job description at the front of my mind, I find I can stay focused on only value-producing activities.

Create focused customer encounters

Lastly, I posited earlier that our collective distraction renders marketing efforts anemic.

How can we get our prospective customers to hear our pitch?

One way is to apply these principles of deep work to your marketing; that is, to work hard at ensuring your message is not sent to distract, but to inform and delight.

If your messaging leads with your product and solution, then you are not honoring the prospect’s focus. You are distracting them with your own message and interests. This robs them of the benefits of focusing on what will bring them more joy.

However, if you empathetically describe their situation and are clear about the problems you solve, they can make a quick and shallow decision, “Do I have this problem?” If the answer is maybe or yes, they can explore further. If not, you allow them to move on. Helping your customer by giving them a shallow decision that can be a binary to a deeper discussion or inspection is the most humane way to sell.

So first, get their attention by making it clear who you serve and what problems you solve.

Next, once you have their attention, you should ensure that the experience is memorable.

Years ago, I saw a promotional giveaway on the Santa Monica Pier for the addictive spicy, savory food product, Takis.

On brand with the theme of the pier, the marketers were dressed as carnival barkers and invited tourists to play their version of the classic arcade game (scam), “The Claw.” Instead, volunteers were strapped to a crane that their friend could lower and articulate around an open pile of bags of Takis. The objective was to lower your friend to grab the promotional giveaways.

This is an example that made the most of the attention of people who enjoyed the snack. They were fully immersed in the experience. Someone suspended by a crane isn’t checking TikTok.

Talk about captivating marketing!

Another way to use attention is via social proof. This is why it’s so powerful to have people testify why your product or service is a good one. You will gain the attention of people who know your customers by proxy. This is why LinkedIn will tell you what your contacts liked or reposted. And why I will be asking my trusted colleagues to like and share this post!

Taking the time to share your services is the best thing your customer can do for you. Reward them for doing it with a thank you (or maybe even a referral bonus!).

Conclusion

As we have seen above, rewiring our brains to draw our attention to the deep and meaningful is a reward in itself. That said, this type of work takes practice to integrate into our businesses and lives.

Kasvaa, the company I lead, is dedicated to the growth of small businesses. One client said they loved working with us because the time spent in discussion with us is the time that they can focus on what matters most.

Do you feel like you are diving from task to task in the “shallows”?

Let’s talk about how we can focus your mind and company on the stuff that brings you the most joy and allows you to expand your mark on the world with meaning and vigor.

As always, I’d love to meet with you as we pour our attention to a common goal.