Fighting For Your Attention

Volume 1, Issue 5: Fighting For Your Attention

(Originally Published February 24, 2019)

What’s New This Week

Welcome back and thanks for joining us again in the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook (formerly the Winter Hearth Creative Journal), where each week we explore the human experience through different mediums, gleaning useful and practical insights to help us live epic life stories.

The Firestarter community is growing steadily, and I’ve seen some of you having conversations and sharing this weekly personal development playbook with your friends — keep being awesome! There is so much passion and energy in this community, and at the heart of it all is our shared desire to learn, grow, and live out our best possible lives.

Following last week’s digest on Letting Go, the theme of this week’s content is The Battle for Your Attention. Some of you may be familiar with the term “attention capital” or the idea of an “attention economy”. The basic premise of these ideas is that in today’s society, there are many things vying intensely for your attention — whether it be family, Netflix, Instagram, Snapchat, email, blogs, Youtube, your pet hamster — you get the point. Your attention is valuable to businesses, because the more time you spend interacting with their products (think Facebook, Instagram, Google, Netflix), the more data they collect on you and your habits, and this data is used to make a greater profit.

Think about how easy Facebook and Instagram have made it to scroll for hours on their platforms, searching for the sparks of excitement or interesting content. Or you can consider Youtube’s autoplay feature, intelligently trained on your viewing habits and designed to keep you on the platform by serving you an even more relevant and engaging video than the one you just finished watching. Or for those who use Snapchat, the streaks feature which give you and a friend a shared, increasingly “valuable” trophy for the number of days you open their app and send a message to each other. And we can’t leave out Netflix’s autoplay and seemingly needy “Are you still there?” features that keep you glued to the screen for as long as possible.

Given that we have a finite amount of time in this life, each moment we have is valuable. We have come to know this idea well enough and it has become fairly trite, but what this week’s journal seeks to explore is the concrete ways in which we are losing our attention to things that we don’t necessarily value, and how to practically shift our attention from those less-valuable things to the things that we find to be more valuable and worth investing our time in.

As always, there’s plenty of content here, so feel free to just take what you need.

Listen

For this week’s Listen section, I tuned in again to the podcast Hurry Slowly, which actually has two great episodes on the subject of attention: “Attention Is Life” with Jonathan Fields, and “I Want My Attention Back!” with Craig Mod. I’ll briefly talk about the former episode here and we’ll get into some practical steps you can take to win the battle for your attention, but be sure to check out the full interviews when you have time this week for an even deeper understanding.

One of the crucial insights that Fields leads with in the episode “Attention Is Life” is the following idea:

“Wherever your attention lands, that is, for that window of time, your life… So if your attention is on something that is meaningless- without purpose to you- then your life, for that window of time, is being devoted to something which is without meaning — without purpose.”

He unravels the notion that if we fill up our finite amount of time in this life with things that do not hold meaning for us, we cannot expect to live a meaningful life. Given all of the things that our attention is being directed to (i.e. the platforms mentioned in the intro), it has become very difficult to realize when our attention is being held by something we don’t really value and, even further, it has become difficult to realize that we are being distracted from the lives that we may really want for ourselves.

I’d be interested in a social experiment where those platforms built around scrolling, like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, track the actual distance that we each scroll each day, week, month, and over the courses of our lives. Might you be scrolling miles, marathons, or even ultras? According to MarketWatch in late 2018, “American adults spend more than 11 hours per day watching, reading, listening to or simply interacting with media.” That’s more than half of the hours we are awake per day.

Fields’ message boils down to constantly asking ourselves the following very important questions:

1. What am I doing right now?
2. What am I trying to accomplish by doing it?
3. Why am I doing it right now?

Every time you pick up your mobile phone, do you have a goal? Is there something you are trying to accomplish? Why do you pick it up? These technologies are meant to be a tool that helps us make our daily lives easier to manage, more efficient, and more enjoyable, but if you find that the tool is controlling your life more so than you are benefitting from its use, it might be time to rethink the situation. I often get bored with what I’m doing, and so I pick up my phone with no clear intent. 45 minutes to an hour later, I’m not quite sure what just happened, but what I am certain of is the fact that I just wasted 45 minutes of my life, probably scrolling some platform to see something I wasn’t even interested in seeing in the first place.

The concept of “mindfulness” is explored in the episode, and leads us to the understanding that if we aren’t being intentionally mindful about what we are doing with our time and attention, then the actions we are taking are probably mindless. For example, if I get a notification on my phone (which I don’t allow anymore) and the screen lights up, I’ll look at the phone, probably unlock it, and go directly to the notification within the span of probably one second — without even thinking about it. In that situation I’m forced to ask myself:

“Was that notification important enough to take me out of the present moment?”
“Why did I need to check the notification right away?”
“Was this even something that I needed to be notified about?”

These and other questions are things that you have to ask yourself if you want to win the battle for your attention and craft a more meaningful life. Above all, when asking yourself these questions, make sure to be honest with yourself and not to try to rationalize your behavior. Improvement starts with an honest assessment of who you are now and an attainable idea of who you want to be.

Challenge

Try this challenge this week: Every time you find yourself using a device, ask yourself what you are currently doing, what you are trying to accomplish by doing it, and why it needs to be done at that exact moment. When the notification pings, when the group messages are drooling down your lock screen, or when you are scrolling down a social platform, ask yourself those questions and mentally note the answers. Do the answers you come up with fall in line with who you want to be? If not, keep performing this awareness-building activity until you are able to break the habits.

Learn

For this week’s Learn section, I watched a really insightful and thought-provoking TED Talk from Tristan Harris, who has been called “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience” by The Atlantic magazine. Harris is the founder of the Center for Humane Technology, a former Design Ethicist at Google, and was named one of the “25 People Shaping the World” in 2017 by Rolling Stone magazine.

In this talk, Harris shares how he has seen the major tech and media companies use psychological tactics to influence our thoughts and behaviors, to persuade us to spend our lives on these platforms, and, of course, to reap a large profit. He discusses the problems we face in a technology-driven society, as well as the precise changes that need to be made to solve those problems.

One major point he notes is that we as humans must acknowledge that we are able to be persuaded. The more that we understand about how our own minds work, the better we can protect ourselves from the people who might try to use our minds against us.

So what can you do to protect yourself from being controlled? Check out the Level Up section below, as well as the TED Talk by Tristan Harris to give yourself a fighting chance to win the battle for your mind.

Level Up

This week’s Level Up section comes from the mind of one of the most notable influencers of our time, Cal Newport. Newport is a theoretical computer science professor at Georgetown University, and has been featured on many TED Talks and podcasts, speaking on the awareness of the effects of social media on our communities, the idea of “Deep Work” (which he has also written a book about), and, more broadly, the intersection between technology and society.

The concept of “Deep Work”, as defined by Newport, is “the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task”. This task could be writing an article, doing a homework assignment, planning an event, or any other thing that you find yourself needing to do at your job or in your daily life. In this interview on Deep Work, he gives 4 rules to help us sharpen our focus and regain our attention, and I’ve added some concrete ways by which we can maximize the benefit of these rules:

1. Work Deeply — Working intentionally in a state of focus allows us to reap great benefits. Tactics that can help you reach this state of focus include:

• Disabling push notifications — If any kind of ping, pop, sparkle or buzz takes you out of your focus zone, disable it. Whether this means putting your devices into airplane mode or Do Not Disturb mode for a period of time or turning off notifications altogether, choose a way that works best for you to protect your focus.
• Schedule your focus time — Be intentional about the time you have set aside to work deeply on a task. Whether you work for 20 minutes or for 3 hours, make sure that your chosen time block is solid and that nothing (except emergencies, of course) is able to disrupt the time you have set to work.
• Schedule the time you check notifications — Most notifications do not need to be addressed in real time, and even further, notifications keep us on-the-clock 24/7, which is detrimental to living an intentional life. Schedule a few small time slots each day to go through all of your notifications, rather than addressing each of them as they come and switching context hundreds of times per day (a situation that leaves something called “attention residue”, which Newport talks about as well in the interview). For example, I have set aside 30 minutes starting at 8:30am and 8:30pm for me to go through all of my emails and Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn notifications. Outside of those times, I do not check these platforms.
• Embrace Boredom — In order to attain a consistent level of focus, you need to train your brain to do so. Just as an artist needs to practice consistently to master their craft, you too must practice focus if you want to gain your attention back. Silence or lack of a pressing task does not necessitate picking up a device and killing time. Instead, find something you value (for me, it’s drawing, writing poetry, and writing this digest) and do that thing in that space. Fill the free spaces in your life with the things you love most.

2. Quit Social Media — This will be a tough sell for the foreseeable future, even for me. Newport insists this not as an attack on social media, but rather as a suggestion for us to be more thoughtful about the tools that we use, to know why we use them, and to select a small number of tools that give us each the most value. Ways that may help us figure out which tools to use include:

• Task-oriented approach — What are you looking to accomplish? For example, are you trying to stay up-to-date on your friends’ lives? Text messaging or calling is much more effective, personal, and intentional than hoping to see their recent updates during a scrolling session. Do you want your friends and acquaintances to hear about and see what you’re up to? Social media is really good for this. However, be intentional about which features you use. If your goal is sharing your updates, you probably will not need to spend time scrolling through hundreds of other updates or hanging out on “explore” pages. **If the goal is to avoid an awkward social encounter (like when we get in an elevator with a stranger and nobody says anything), see the content from digest #2 on introductions!
• Research the environments and impacts of the technology you use — Be conscious of the implicit biases and influences of various platforms and systems and how they can affect you.Check out this awesome TED Talk for more insight on the topic.
• Ask yourself awareness-building questions — Check out the Challenge in the Listen section for ways to build your awareness and to help you figure out which tools you actually need to accomplish your goals.

4. “Drain the shallows” — The idea of this rule is to “reduce the amount of shallow work in your working tasks”, meaning focus on the important tasks when you are in your focused state, rather than dealing with all of the smaller, less important tasks.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Fireside Spotlight

In last week’s Fireside Spotlight, we saw a piece called “The Simple Sound”, and this week’s piece is a poem entitled “671”. This piece is pretty personal to me, so I hope you’ll give it a read. It explores one of the toughest periods of my life that I had never really tried to put words to until now, and maybe you can relate to it on some level. “What is 671?” you might ask. Well, there’s one sure way to find out 😉

671

Slumped anxiously against the ivory windowsill, he warily peered out into today’s storm — yesterday’s storm — tomorrow’s storm, careful not to see too much — Not to see too much. Not to think too much. Not to say too much. Not to feel too much.

Save me.

His shallow breaths danced sheepishly on the thick window pane, tapping to the cadence of a pain long forgotten, tapping to the rhythm of distress.
His distressed jeans began to cut off circulation as he receded farther into the depths of himself, falling nowhere fast, falling to the feet of Darkness, who greeted his advance and gave him a quick, comforting kiss on the cheek.

Outside in the gripping clutches of the now raging storm, his friend of 3 years, Otis, walked by cheerfully and upright. Unphased, unaffected, unperturbed.

I know I know who that was.

Jolted back to the inner reaches of his mind, shrouded with a mist of delusion, he sat up straight, eyes fixed steadily, intently on the world beyond the window.

What was his name?

The fallen brown leaves graced the fallow, fertile ground outside his sanctuary, sauntering loftily between the exploding thunder of the tempest.

Six-hundred and seventy days.

Peals of anger, rage boomed from above, seamlessly rending the heavens and the earth apart. The rumblings reverberated in his ears like drumfire, blasting the all-too-familiar anthem of chaos, as it had for the last six-hundred and seventy days. He shuddered, blood rushing through his body like glaciers tearing across the open sea.

Who was that? I, I know I know him.

Struggle as it might, the sun will not come out today. No — today will not be that day.

He reached into the pile of clothes strewn about his bed and pulled out a black shirt that read “More Than a Conqueror”. Resigning to give today another shot, he sniffed the shirt, donned his hope, and marked another tick off on the wall.

Six-hundred and seventy-one.

Six-hundred and seventy-one days had now passed since the last concussion. With a lungful of trepidation and eyes dark as death, he exhaled, neatly gathered his things, and set out into the storm once more.

Walk It, Talk it

Thanks again for joining us this week in the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook! In the words of Dale Carnegie, “Knowledge isn’t power until it is applied.” How can you apply the ideas in this digest to your life? How can you use it to gain power in living a more epic story? Talk to your friends and family this week about something you found interesting in the digest.

This weekly personal development playbook is a labor of love, so if you enjoy reading it each week, please share it with your friends to assist us in reaching our goal of helping the world achieve a better human experience :)

Your Greatest Chapter Awaits

Until next time,
Elgin

Have feedback? Content you want to learn more about?

Feel free to drop an email to winterhearthstudios@gmail.com to get in touch with me, I’d love to hear from you!

Hey, I’m Elgin, and I love to create. I’m the creator of Winter Hearth Studios and the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook, a space where we explore the depths of the human experience, discovering the keys to crafting a better life and inspiring you to Live An Epic Story.

I’m currently a 4th year student at Harvard University studying computer science and design, and in my free time I love to travel, draw, read, and pursue bold, exciting adventures.

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