I called out, “15613,” and he called out, “15626,” and then I replied, “15639.” For the past two hours, we’d simply been adding thirteens together. We’d done this little ritual over 1200 times—about 10 times a minute— for one reason: to keep our minds focused on something else other than agony.
Raj and I had stumbled upon what scientists call a
Mischel brought children aged four to six years into a room free from distractions, and asked them to choose a treat: a pretzel stick, an Oreo cookie, or a marshmallow. Their treat of choice was placed on a table with a chair in front of it, and the children were told that they could have the treat right away or, if they waited for 15 minutes, they could get a second treat.
If you’ve ever been around kids, sweets, and willpower, you already know what happened: most of the kids fell apart. Only a third were able to double their payoff. The rest of the kids ate the marshmallow, and most didn’t make it anywhere close to 15 minutes.
What Mischel found, though, was that the children who were able to pass the test wanted the marshmallow just as much as their short-term investing peers. What they possessed wasn’t willpower, but a better skill at “strategic allocation of attention.” The kids that succeeded spent the 15 minutes doing something other than obsessing about the marshmallow: they sang songs, took naps, and avoided even looking at the marshmallow. You can find the research videos on YouTube, where you’ll see this effect in action if you watch. The successful children are the ones who fill their minds up with things other than the deliciousness of marshmallows.
The interesting part came a decade later, when Mischel followed up with the teenagers. The third of children that did succeed turned out to have scored higher on the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) than those that couldn’t wait for their sugar high. They were arguably on their way to more life success than the ones who had failed. Our ability to exercise this strategic allocation of attention is a cognitive resource that indicates academic success.
Willpower
A few years ago, I found myself completely unable to read more than a thousand words. There was no way I could read long-form journalism or even a book. The concept of reading a book, much less writing one, was completely foreign to me.
With emails to check and reply to, I could spend the entire day trapped in a sea of distraction, having accomplished nothing. My life was littered with notifications. The little email envelope icon sitting next to the clock on my computer, the Twitter notifications, and Facebook took so much time to process that I wasn’t able to accomplish much else. My suffering was coming from a lack of will to focus.
Some scientists certainly seem to think it’s the case that willpower is an exhaustible resource in the mind. In the book
Their book catalogues experiments in which participants who complete a task involving their will (like resisting fresh cookies) struggle to complete completely unrelated tasks (like solving a geometric puzzle) later. Resisting a candy bar may weaken your resolve in a high-pressure sales environment like buying a car.
Willpower is part of what cognitive scientists call
If we are training our brains to shorten our attention spans and tune in to the cacophony of distractions around us, then we must certainly be able to train it to do the opposite, and strengthen it the other way around.
Over the past few years, I’ve developed a framework for myself that has helped me increase my attention span. It’s geared towards people who spend most of their work time behind computer screens, but the theory can be applied to all kinds of careers, and it doesn’t need to be tied to work at all. It’s simply a system for measuring and lengthening your attention span. What you pay attention to is a completely different matter.
Measurement
If will is a trait, like intelligence, that improves our lives, and it’s an exhaustible resource, then we have to think of our attention like a currency. Our language is well-suited for this already—we don’t “burn” attention, we usually “pay” it, and often times, like the federal budget, it has deficits. Our attention is the currency that marketers lust for, and it’s about time we started guarding it, consciously, like we guard our bank accounts.
Nothing can be increased if it first cannot be measured. In order to track your progress, the foundation of our system relies upon good, practical measurement. We need software that can measure how we’re using our computers and what we’re focused on. Fortunately enough, there’s great software for this called RescueTime, and it’s available for the Mac or the PC. You can find it by visiting RescueTime.com or by visiting the resources section of InformationDiet.com.
RescueTime sits in the background, whenever you’re using your desktop, and tracks what you pay attention to. It’s a silent, impartial judge that watches every website you visit, and every window you have open on your desktop, and measures how productive you are.
During your first week using RescueTime, log in to the RescueTime website frequently to fine-tune the software. You can set up lists of websites that are healthy and necessary for you to do your job and part of your ongoing set of work, and other websites that are distractions.
Be strict with yourself: if you’ve found yourself constantly clicking the refresh button in your web-based email client, go ahead and mark email as antiproductive for you. Same goes with the news sites and blogs that you read. If you’re an overshopper, make sure RescueTime knows that Amazon.com is bad for you.
Every week, RescueTime will send you an email giving you a productivity score, and comparing your productivity to that of the entire RescueTime community. What we want to do now is make this number go up.
Elimination
After you’ve set up RescueTime to measure your progress, you need to take a hard look at your computer and start eliminating the things that are distractions. You want to move yourself from a reactive model of computing, where you’re constantly being tugged and pulled in every direction and responding to every notification that comes across your screen, into a conscious model, where you’re in complete control of what you’re paying attention to.
Take a look at your workspace, and silence everything that’s set up to notify you of anything. Silence your phone, put it on vibrate, and put it on something soft so that you can’t hear it when you’re working.
Take a look in the “system tray” of your computer—either that spot near the bottom where your clock is on Windows, or that spot near the top on your Mac. If any of those little icons there (besides the clock) change color, create little cartoon bubbles, or otherwise generate notifications, get rid of them.
Close down your desktop Twitter client, and shut off your instant messages. Change your Outlook preferences to only receive new messages when you click the send and receive button.
One way to do this in modern operating systems is to create a new user account on the same computer you use, but without access to all the software that keeps you distracted. That’s how I’ve set myself up—I have one user called “Work” and another called “Play.” This gives me a container that I can put my mindless web surfing
