Digital traction control
How can we engineer environments that support focus?
“The trouble with computers is you play with them.”
Richard Feynman, on computing during the Manhattan Project
George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, p.60*
Computers and the Internet have made many things easier, and many things possible. But there may be a particular kind of work they’ve made harder: heroic feats of sustained independent concentration.
In The New Yorker’s Elements, Tim Wu writes that focused marathons by people like Kafka, Kerouac, Jobs and Wozniak are much harder in today’s distracting digital world. Nicholas Carr sees us wading in “The Shallows,” and William Powers wants off-the-grid “Walden Zones.” While we protest the FCC’s absurd in-flight restrictions, “Airplane Mode” can be a welcome respite; I unplugged to live deliberately. That Thoreau’s words still apply reminds us that this is an old issue. But its modern manifestations are worth examining.
Among technology companies, friction is out of style. The party line is all about breaking down boundaries, freeing your mind. But we all depend on friction every day: to walk, to drive, to hold things. When we like friction, we just call it traction.
Inertia is out of style. It’s all about being agile, pivoting on a dime. But be glad you have inertia when you need to maintain a heading, put your weight into something, or just not blow away in the wind.
Constraints got us here. As the biologist Stuart Kauffman says, work builds constraints and constraints do work: building the cell membrane lets a cell import order and export disorder, and thus self-propagate. But new technology too rarely gives us productive new constraints — pathways, filters, selectively-permeable barriers. Particularly when the commodity at hand is our attention.
We’re not aiming for total monastic solitude, but rather, what psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls “flow”: “complete absorption in the present moment”; an intense, focused, productive state of being “in the zone.” Moderate multitasking is useful to maintaining flow: a quick dictionary lookup, a reference citation, some peer feedback. Maybe you need a flash of inspiration or a short break to get out of a rut. But how can our dumb computers distinguish good multitasking from bad?
How can we engineer environments that support focus? Add-on apps (Freedom, Self Control, RescueTime, Instapaper, iA Writer) can help, but a serious solution would need to span the full stack, from hardware to software. Traders have their Bloomberg terminals; what would analogues for artists, writers, and programmers look like? Maybe task-oriented, locked-down, and quiet.
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Self-impose hard lock-in: Apps like Freedom work by binding your future self to a present aspiration to not use the Internet. We’ve always been able to make contracts with ourselves, but now the computer can actually enforce them. It can thereby respect the user’s long-term goals, while discouraging fleeting temptations. You have to start with the choice to buy in.
Auto-impose soft lock-in: Mode-switching (like Caps Lock or Alt-Tab) is so jarring that user-interface pioneer Larry Tesler made “NO MODES” his license plate. That’s an extreme position, but so is immediate frictionless mode-switching. Imagine “inertial modes”: not blocking, but resistance. Staying on-task should be the effortless default, and staying distracted should require exertion. Some modes could be “attractive” (Microsoft Word); some “repulsive” (Facebook).
Triage, prioritize, nudge: Choice can overwhelm. Software can help. Netflix encourages binge-watching whole seasons by autoplaying the next episode, making it easier to stay “focused” on Netflix than get “distracted” by work. It’s easier to passively consume than actively produce, but good nudges could help reverse the incentives. Gmail could begin your reply to the next starred email as soon as you sent the last. Users, not service providers, should control the balance of nudges.
Dam the streams: One way to distinguish good multitasking from bad is to avoid introducing unrelated new topics. The system could disable indiscriminate streams (like the News Feed or new email threads) while retaining random-access lookup capabilities.
Internalize attention costs: Push notifications are Public Enemy No. 1, but trusted individuals with important messages must be able to punch through the cone of silence when necessary. Statuses could signal the recipient’s current notification load, influx rate, and response rate. Stamps (like Facebook is trying) would give that signaling real coercive power; the price could vary based on focus, workload, and social signals (like discounts for those trusted friends).
Reform cultural expectations: Attention is a scarce resource that can be protected, paid, or stolen. Physical property and intellectual property are protected, but little protects attention. We need to defrag our schedules, preserving blocks of uninterrupted free time, cherishing spontaneity and optionality. And we need to recognize the cost of appointments not only by their duration, but by the switching costs and fragmentation they incur.
Beware ads: The computing revolution has been subsidized by unprecedented eyeball-access and attention-mining, like fracking the mind. Anyone aiming to buck that trend will have to pay a premium for it. The easiest way to reclaim some attention is to buy it back. But there’s another angle: if you can reclaim some attention by the above techniques, you have that much more to sell.
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“It’s time to create more tools that help us with what our brains are bad at, such as staying on task,” writes Wu. It may already be the case that computers tend to be good at what humans are bad at, and vice versa; this is called Moravec’s paradox. Computers can focus indefinitely — but they do little to help us focus.
The human in its natural habitat is actually probably decent at staying on task, but its modern environment is hostile to that, and it hurts. As Wu concludes, primum non nocere: beyond augmenting our weaknesses, tools should protect our competencies.
Is there room for more platforms? Gaming consoles, e-readers, and the aforementioned Bloomberg — great for just this kind of dedicated focus — are threatened species. My hope is that devices can be general-purpose and still support deep engagement.
Tearing down the old walls has done wonders for the world. Now we need to think about erecting new ones — very carefully, in the right places.
Sometimes you need to go downhill to climb a mountain; use physical force to preserve peace; exercise limited intolerance to protect tolerance. And sometimes you need constraints to free yourself to achieve your goals. There’s no contradiction there.
Steve Jobs called the computer “a bicycle for our minds.” The wheels need traction, and sometimes you need to shift gears.
