Craig Roth“Information overload” has received significantly more coverage than “attention management”. I find that disappointing, but not surprising. After all, information overload sets up conflicts, such as “too much information vs. too little time”, “inconsiderate email senders vs. overburdened email readers”, “primitive brains designed for interruptions vs. modern demands for focusing on long-term tasks”, etc. As any writer knows, conflict makes for a good story.
But a Wall St. Journal reviewer has found a better story in the book “Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?”, edited by John Brockman. In her review of the book, Christine Rosen finds a common thread among the essays: attention. She quotes philosopher Thomas Metzinger saying “attention is a finite commodity, and it is absolutely essential to living a good life”. MIT professor Rodney Brooks is quoted: the Internet “is stealing our attention. It competes for it with everything else we do”. Author Howard Rheingold says “Attention is the fundamental literacy”.
Rosen quotes Metzinger as writing about “the deceptively simple challenge of ‘attention management’”. Three cheers for Mr. Metzinger! I’ve been advising organizations to focus on attention management for years in my writing and blogging. Once you are tuned in to attention management, it is surprising how often attention is pegged as a root cause (such as interruptions, distractions, and task-switching habits) of many dysfunctional behaviors at which “information overload” merely shakes an angry fist.
The inability of people to focus attention on just the bits of information that deserve it and ignore the rest will never be solved. But it can be managed, as my research (which has just begun to scratch the surface) has shown. I continue to urge organizations – in particular those few people in organizations who can provide technical and cultural tools to large groups of information workers – to adopt attention management as a conceptual model.
Competitive organizations or those that strive for efficiency cannot afford to be passive in the face of the enormous demands on information workers to process data flows. Rosen quotes Neuroscientist Brian Knutson as saying “the Internet may impose a ‘survival of the focused’”. If only the focused will excel in their industries, I’d rather be on the side of those who consciously manage the scarce resource called “attention”.
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