Focused - 93: Attention Overload

Episode Date: February 18, 2020

In this second part of the overload series, David & Mike discuss emotional hijacking, the myth of multitasking, and how to tame the lizard brain.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mike. How are you today? I'm doing well. How about you? You have my full attention, brother. Excellent. Well, that's very apropos because today's topic is attention. This is part two in our Overload series.

In episode 91, we talked about information overload and kind of related to that, but also its own separate topic is this attention overload, which we are going to tackle today. Yeah, and there's more overload coming. So if you're overloaded, keep listening. We do have a little bit of follow-up here from the things that we said we were going to do in episode 91. I had a couple which were related to pruning, which I mentioned Twitter, RSS, podcast feeds, and notifications. And I have gone through all of those things and eliminated the things that really weren't sparking joy for me. They were just kind of in the list. They'd been there for a long time. Or maybe it was, in the case of Twitter, somebody that I had

been following because I knew them in real life, but they hadn't posted in a long time. And it felt kind of weird removing those people from my following list. But afterwards, when I had cut loose about 50 people, it felt really good. So I'm proud to say that I did this. I really have, in response to that show, I really thought about the kind of data I want pouring into my brain as well. And I went through Twitter and I actually ignored, I didn't have the guts that you did,

but I ignored a bunch of people that are friends that tweet a lot of negative stuff um i just didn't want all that and um did the same thing we did a show on mac power users on notifications as well so if you want the nuts and bolts of how to turn off notifications that's a very recent day uh 422 of mac power users i don't just go look at Mac or relay.fm slash Mac power users or MPU and you'll find it. But the, um, but the notification thing was good. I really needed to go through, even though I know about this stuff, it's like, I feel like every three months or so there's a big notification creep in my life. So I went through and fixed that. That helped a lot too. So I went through and fixed that. That helped a lot too.

I talked in that episode. What I wanted to do was reduce my media sources. I wanted to change my default from, should I keep this to, instead of, you know, is it, what's a really good reason to add this? You know, I was always looking at new media as to, you know, can I add this one? Should I, and I thought I had a pretty good filter in my brain, but changing the default is, should I keep watching this? It was really good, and I got rid of several TV programs. Awesome. In fact, I'm only keeping those that are worth my full attention,

which gets us to today. Right, right. Another item of follow-up, which just comes to mind now because I had a conversation with somebody last week because they've been following along and they said, you know, you've been talking about you need to create, not consume. You got to eliminate all this stuff that really isn't bringing you joy. How do you balance that with the fact that you are creating more information and sending it out into the world? And my response was that not all information is created equal.

And I would argue that the stuff that we're creating and for focus specifically, this is going to bring you more long term good than another cat video on YouTube or whatever. But also, I mentioned that this is something that everybody has to kind of land on for themselves. And if you decide that you want to have a whole bunch of things that you're following, that's completely fine. And in essence, it's your problem, not mine. Like you have to, everybody has to kind of take responsibility for managing their, their own sources of, of information and attention, which really is at the heart of this whole series and worth calling out right here.

I think just as a reminder for everybody, you know, we're not giving you a prescription on like, this is what you have to do. These follow-up action items, these are things that we wanted to do. But I challenge people just to kind of think about it and think how they can apply it to their lives for themselves. Well, I think with the topic of overload in general, I would like you to think about it in terms of like your diet. Like you can't eat all junk food. You got to eat, you know, meat and I'm going to get in trouble for saying that. But anyway, you've got to eat fruits and vegetables and the food that you need to nourish you. You can't just eat all junk food.

And I think with overload, a lot of the problem we have is that there's just so much junk food. And my answer to the challenge of, well, you're adding more, I'd say, well, I'm not adding junk food. If I thought what I was making was junk food, I wouldn't be making it. So, you know, that's kind of the approach I take to it and, and take a look at it. And honestly, I do consume as well. I mean, I like creating stuff, but sometimes I just need downtime. And I'm going to spend that downtime reading a good book or watching a television program that makes me think about things, or am I going to spend it watching something stupid? And that's really the challenge for all of us. Yep, totally agree. We've only got so much to work with, which kind of leads us into today's topic of attention. The very first thing on the outline here is that time and attention

are the one resource that you can't get more of. And you've got a question here, why do we squander? Do you have an answer to that? No, I don't. But I think it's a state. Think about how much we protect things like our money, all the efforts we go to with multiple passwords and banks with massive vaults and the stuff we buy, the locks on our doors and the alarm systems we put in our homes

and all the stuff we do to protect our doors and the alarm systems we put in our homes and all the stuff we do to protect our stuff and our money. But all those things can be replaced. If someone steals your beloved Yoda statue, you can buy another one. If someone steals your time, you cannot get it back. It's just gone. Someone like Bill Gates, who has a lot of money, still doesn't have more hours in the day than you and I do. Yeah. So when you put it in that context, then you look at it. How often do we let people just take our time for stupid things?

I mean, whether it's the programmers at Facebook or the guy that calls your phone to sell you something. There's so many dumb things in life that we just give our time to. And it's so precious. So I think that's kind of the underlying point of this attention overload episode is that you've got to understand how important your attention is. There's people out there that recognize how valuable it is. Quite often, you, dear listener, do not. And you need to be just as precious with that, if not more, than your most precious possession or your bank account. Absolutely. With the attention specifically, it's something that we have to make sure that

we're in control of it. That's really the point I want to get across to anybody who's listening to this. It's not the fact that you decide to go chase something stupid like you said. We've all got those things that bring us joy that really aren't constructive. We can't say, this is making me a better person or helping me achieve my life goals. It's just fun. I want to do it. And that's completely fine. But it's the unintentional application of our attention to the things that really aren't serving any purpose for us that we got to be careful about. And this is the world that we live in. Things are designed, engineered to grab our attention. It's a limited resource, like you said. And the truth is that we live in

an attention economy. There's so many services out there, there's so much information, and they're all vying for the limited attention that we have to give to things. And companies are, they want your attention so bad that they are using everything that they have at their disposal to manipulate you so that they can get it. Here's an example from my life yesterday. And I'm going to talk later about how I'm trying to up the war on multitasking in my life. But yesterday I was multitasking. The way I have a very particular way, I load my drawers with socks and underwear. So my wife has given up hope on me, and now she just puts it on a pile on the bed and says,

okay, you do it, smart guy. And so I do that, turn the TV on in the bedroom to YouTube, right? And YouTube is a master at knowing things that are interesting to me based on what I've done before, and it just starts playing these videos, and it plays one after the other. And before I realize it, I'm laying on the bed, socks and underwear have been put away for an undetermined amount of time. And I'm sitting there watching stupid videos that I didn't choose to

watch that an algorithm picked for me. And I was literally a time vortex. I, when I woke up to, I'm like, wait a second, how long have I been here? You know, and I've got a million things I should be doing that are more important than letting YouTube stuff videos down my throat. And, you know, we all make these mistakes. Definitely. That reminds me of a book that I have read called Your Money or Your Life. that I have read called Your Money or Your Life. And I kind of hesitate to bring this up because it's part of the FIRE movement, which I'm not 100% behind everything that you'll find there. FIRE being financial dependent, retire early. I think that there's people in that community that can take that too far. But I think the principle is definitely valid where when you are going to

spend money on something, you are trading a portion of your life for that thing. And like you said, even in the financial realm, we have trouble with that, but we understand that this is costing me something. And there's at least a little bit of resistance to just forking over money for something that you don't need or don't even want. But when it comes to our time and our attention, we do it all the time because we figure it really isn't costing us anything. But the truth is that it's costing us the same thing as that money did to acquire it. It's costing us the time that we're, the portion of our life that we've given to that thing without any sort of direction.

I totally agree. I feel like the default in humans is completely out of whack. Yep. Yep. So that's what we want to try to do is kind of reclaim those defaults and recognize in this first section of this episode, we want to kind of talk about what we're dealing with. And that's this whole idea of attention overload. So we kind of talked about there's so much information out there. We don't want to just give our attention to the things that we really shouldn't be thinking about. We don't want to be thinking about. Don't even let those things into our sphere of influence. But I wanted to find attention overload because as I was doing some research for this episode, found out that this

is not something that you and I came up with in our monthly planning call, David. This is something that is in the psychology world and it's a very real thing. It's a psychological condition that results from excessive demands on attention, usually due to too much stimuli. And this is interesting to me personally, because I have worked with a family business for a long time, and we've sold software to special education. So we have worked, a lot of our end users were people with autism. And this attention overload, this is common in people with autism. And I don't want to equate what they go through because it's pretty scary if you've ever seen some of those simulations of an individual with autism walking into a store, for example, and there's so much noise, there's so much going on that they just get completely overwhelmed and

they can't function. Most of us don't deal with it to that degree. But there are the same effects kind of taking place on a smaller scale in our lives. We've got temporary depletion of our available attention, which results in an inability to cope with any more tasks that require our attention. We may not experience that the moment that we walk into a department store, but we've probably all, if we're honest with ourselves, hit that point in our lives where we just throw in the towel and we say, okay, I can't take any more. This is it. Yeah, I mean, it's just like we hear about that all the time from listeners that have an overwhelming task list and they wake up in the morning and they feel defeated before they do

anything. It's an overload. And I guess it's a self-created attention overload, but we do it to ourselves all the time, I think. Yep. And it happens little by little, so you don't even realize that it's happening, but it kind of adds up and it has this cumulative effect, I would argue. I found one study done by Microsoft in Canada that showed that over the last two decades, the average attention span has decreased almost a third from 12 seconds to eight and a half seconds. almost a third, from 12 seconds to eight and a half seconds. And again, this is not just people with a medical condition. This is the average person. We're used to getting what we want, when we want it. And if we don't get it immediately, we don't know what to do. So we look for something else. Yeah, it's sad. And this is partly a result of the kind of running theme on our show about the way mobile devices, you know, break

your attention into such small segments throughout the course of the day. And that's a real danger. I wonder if that's, I'd like to know why it's gone down that much. Yeah, well, I'm sure that the smartphone has certainly contributed to that because we have portal to any information that we want in our pockets. It's connected to the internet anytime that we want it. And anytime that we're bored, we pull that out and we find something to fill the void. And we're going to talk about that in a little bit. I do think that a lot of people suffer from an attention overload that don't know that that's the root cause of their problem.

Yep. Because there's just so much going on. You don't stop to think about it that way. I had an experience. I've kind of shared a little bit on the show. I'll talk about it a little bit more later in today's outline. But over a course of months, I took on some projects I shouldn't have, and I got kind of overwhelmed.

But it was really at its root core and attention overload problem because I felt like I had all these deadlines and, and I had more to do than I had time to do. And it was really debilitating for me. It just really made it hard to get the work I'd promised to do completed and certainly stopped me from doing other work that I wanted to be doing from getting done. And, and I, um, I feel like I'm just coming out of that now. And it really, in hindsight, it was an attention overload problem. And I did shut down to a certain extent on it. It's interesting. As we're going through this, I'm recognizing that the episode that we did with Sean Blanc, where we talked about margin, that's kind of the answer in all of these different areas. And to revisit

that real briefly, Richard Swenson, the author of the book Margin, he defines margin as the space between your limit and your load. And overload is constantly having your limit be your load where you don't have any space for anything that goes wrong. And so something that does go wrong because nothing's going to go perfectly according to plan, that's enough to push you over the edge. And then when that happens, you don't have any margin to make up for it. And so that's when all the plates that you're trying to spin come crashing down. Yeah. The analogy I used to always use was, I don't know if you remember when you were a kid and you would run downhill and you would run as fast as you could downhill. And it was exhilarating because you

were going faster than you normally could, but it want the slightest stumble. You were going straight on your face. I mean, there was, there was no room to slow down or stop. And I feel like, um, overload has that same feeling that you're going so fast that there's just no room for any error. And you need room for error because there will be error. There will be error. And then also, I think it's valuable to recognize what happens when you do get pushed into overload. But maybe let's, let's tackle that after our first break here. Let's tackle that after our first break here. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Ahrefs.

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overload. I mean, what is your body going through when you do this to yourself? Yeah, sensory overload is kind of a related topic. As I was doing research for this episode, there's a lot of different terms that were being thrown around on the websites that I was seeing. And sensory overload is basically when the brain becomes overwhelmed with the sensory input coming in and it triggers a fight, flight, or freeze response. I've heard that described as emotional hijacking before. And it's a little bit different, I would say more modern take on the fight versus flight response, which people are probably familiar with.

Adds another option though, freeze, where you just are paralyzed and you don't know what to do next. And I think for a lot of people today who are experiencing attention overload, sensory overload, information overload, but they're not being chased by a saber-toothed tiger, that this is a very real thing. You know, you're not going to freeze when the tiger's chasing you, but we can get to the point now where we don't have those physical dangers that are staring us in the face and we just are paralyzed. We don't know where to

go or what to do next. I mean, as a species, we haven't evolved that much, but technology has gone so fast that we really are ill-equipped for some of this. Yep, exactly. I've actually done quite a bit of study on the topic of emotional intelligence in the past. And so real briefly, I thought it might be worthwhile to kind of unpack what happens in your brain as you go through this emotional hijacking, which is the result of this attention or sensory overload. There's different parts of your brain. This is going to be a little bit difficult without a picture,

but the amygdala is basically the center of the brain, and that's what controls your emotions. It can help you quickly decide on an emotional way of acting in a situation. Now, when you see something, a visual signal goes from the eye to the thalamus, where it gets translated into the language of the brain. Then signal goes from the eye to the thalamus, where it gets translated into the language of the brain. Then it goes to the visual cortex. That is where it gets analyzed for meaning and you identify an appropriate response. So that's the logical part of the brain, where you can identify, my boss asking me to do this project. This is not the same

as a saber-toothed tiger trying to eat me, so we don't need to respond the same. not the same as a saber-toothed tiger trying to eat me, so we don't need to respond the same. The problem, though, is that the response may not always be rational. It might be emotional. That might be the right way to respond to this. And in that case, the message would go from the visual cortex to the amygdala. But a portion of the message skips the visual cortex logical part altogether and goes straight to the amygdala, which results in a faster but a less precise response. So even though you know your boss asking you to work on this additional project and being chased by a saber-toothed tiger are not the same thing, your amygdala doesn't. And it can trigger an emotional response before your visual

cortex can even understand what's really happening. And that is what is known as emotional hijacking. And when you overload yourself with attention overload, I think it's very easy for that hijack to occur. Exactly. It happens all the time. You don't even realize it. In fact, I would argue that a lot of people are getting used to living in this state where in the past it was a temporary thing that helped you survive. It's something that's becoming more common now as we've given away all of the margin that we had and we have to keep all these plates spinning. We go back and forth into overload all the time and we don't even realize it because it's not that big a deal, we think. It's just something I got to push through. And you got to be careful because this is not supposed

to be the default state. This is not where you are supposed to set up shop. The fight versus flight response, I mean, there's a couple of options there. Number one, the fight response, you can engage in combat, right? But that's not going to be great with a coworker. So if you're dealing with overload and you cause some conflict, that can have ramifications down the road for you. The other probably more popular option for introverts like me is the flight response where you just acquiesce to the request. Okay, I'll figure out a way to do this, you know, and then eventually it all piles up. Everything's got to be done perfectly in order to, in order for

things have to go perfectly in order for the things that you have committed to to be done. And you kind of resent the fact that you've had all of these things put on top of you, but there's nothing you can do about it. So eventually it gets to be too much and you just drop them all and you say, I'm done. You walk away. I've been there. That's not a great response either. It would be much better to say, you know, this is what I got on my plate. I really don't think I can handle this right now. But for the person who is dealing with somebody who has a more forceful personality, especially if they're higher up on the food chain at a corporation, for example, sometimes you feel like you can't say anything. You can't push back. You just take. And then eventually you've taken all you can take and you can't take no more. And that's when stuff hits a

fan. Yeah. And then the third response is to freeze, which I think the modern equivalent is to shut down and maybe not do it, but not fight it either, you know, which a lot of people find themselves in. The interesting thing about all this is that there are modern equivalents. I mean, we start the conversation with this stuff always with the saber-toothed tiger. I don't know why, but it's fun to talk about tigers, I guess. But this stuff translates into our modern world with slightly less extreme versions, yet the underlying problem is still there, that the

lizard brain is still controlling the response and you're not using logic, you know, your logic facilities to control the response and it gets you into trouble every time. Exactly. Yeah, I'm reading right now Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman for Bookworm. And he talks about two different systems, system one and system two, where system one is kind of the one, the lizard brain, as you would describe it, where it's just going to jump to conclusions. And system two is going to be the one that's going to try to think things through and be logical and rational about things. But you don't always get to system two, especially when you've got a whole bunch of things that you need to get done and you don't have enough time to do them in. The tendency is to say, well,

the only way this is going to get done is to let my lizard brain just respond, deal with it quickly, immediately, and then I'll try to figure out what to do next. But when you do that, a lot of times you create more work for yourself, a bigger problem that you've got to unravel. And we got to recognize that that's not the correct response most of the time. The correct response is to create the space to get us out of this mess that we've found ourselves in. Well, I would argue that it's not the correct response like 99% of the time.

And the thing that you have to recognize is as humans, this isn't something, it's not like a personal failing to you that this is happening. It's chemistry and, you know, hardwiring. It was hardwiring because we grew up as a species in a very dangerous place where death was always around the corner. If you find yourself standing in a street and a bus is coming at you, the lizard brain response is going to serve you well. Hopefully you're going to jump out of the way and you're not going to stop to think about it.

Well, is this bus going to hit me? You don't have time for that. You just got to move. But the times in your life right now that that is an issue are very small. Hopefully, I really hope. I'm sure some folks out there don't live in necessarily safe conditions. But for a lot of us, we're fortunate that we do. And yet we still let this hijacking occur multiple times a day in some of the most important things in our life.

And I think you really have to actively fight against it. And I think attention overload, when you put yourself in a situation of attention overload, you're stacking the deck against you in terms of fighting that response. Yeah, it's not a knowledge problem. It's not knowing what to do. It's a hardware problem. It's the way that your body is wired. You don't have to teach yourself self-preservation. Your body is just going to go into that. And there's a whole bunch of stuff that happens on a physiological level when this fight versus flight response is triggered. The sympathetic nervous system, which is the part of the involuntary nervous system, and that's the one that controls everyday bodily functions like your heartbeat, your blood pressure, breathing, and food digestion. It's also responsible for hormones

like adrenaline and brings about increased blood pressure, heart rate, and metabolism. So that gets triggered when you go into this fight versus flight response. It's kind of a temporary thing. Everything goes into overdrive, right? And then when the threat is gone, then it can go back to normal. The thing is, if you stay there very long, you're going to burn out. And so you can't just slip back and forth in this all the time. It should be a once in a while, if needed thing, instead of something that happens almost every day, which I've been there. I've dealt with this myself. So no judgment if this is where you find yourself, but we just want to kind of articulate that this is what is actually going on. And it's not just because you don't know how to deal with things. It's because of

the environment that you find yourself in. So the solution here is to kind of change your environment so that your hardware can function in a way that's healthier and more sustainable. And I would really argue that this is a condition you put yourself in as a result of attention overload. I mean, when you get yourself in an overwhelmed situation, it is a lot harder to dial back that lizard brain. People ask me sometimes, you know, about meditation. They're like, are you trying to like reach a higher plane of existence? I mean, there are people who really genuinely meditate for some real high lofty goals. And honestly, the answer for me, and I've been meditating now since 1987, so it's quite a few years, is just to get a little space between action and reaction.

That's all it is to me. I mean, a daily meditation practice has taught me over the years, which even after all these years, I'm still not perfect at, but I mean, it gives me space on action and reaction. I think it allows me to subvert the lizard brain a few more times, more times than I would otherwise. And that's why it's worth it to me. That's the end of the story. I mean, there, there's not a whole lot more to it than that. And, um, and I, I think that, uh, anything you can do to, to tip the scales in your favor is going to give you an increase in the quality of your life. The distance between the impulse and the action, that's the important thing that we're missing in general in our society today because we have access to any information whenever we want it in the form of the smartphone that we carry in our pockets, most of us. want it in the form of the smartphone that we carry in our pockets, most of us. So that's getting into this whole idea of dopamine, which is how we find ourselves in this place of having attention

overload in the first place, I would argue. It's not that somebody did this to us. It's that when we got the notification to let us know that somebody liked the Facebook post, or we went into our email because we expected a response. Those things trigger the release of dopamine in our brains, which is the pleasure chemical. It happens automatically. It's kind of like the Pavlov's dogs experiment, you know, where he would ring the bell and they would start salivating. They know there's a variable reward scenario that's coming next. So you feel like you have to check it, but that's what you're expecting when you go in there. And then when you don't find it, sometimes you feel let down,

but that's a whole nother topic. This dopamine though, whenever we feel the urge, we feel like we need to satisfy that urge. And with the ability to pull out our phones and check it within a couple of seconds, you know, that's the thing that meets the need for the dopamine and we become addicted to that. It's the same physiological response in your brain. If you were to take a brain scan of somebody who is addicted to Oreos, for example, or even somebody who's addicted to drugs or alcohol,

the way that their brain lights up when they take a drink or they take a hit, it's the exact same thing that happens to the person who feels like they need to respond to the notifications. And again, if you find yourself there, that's not the end of the story. Okay, so that's not necessarily a bad thing. Just recognize, first of all, that this is what's happening. And then you can start to take steps to create the environment, which will help you overcome that if it's something that you want to. Which I would argue, you know, everybody's kind of, I would argue, feeling the effects of this. Even if they don't know specifically what's contributing to it and everybody wants relief in some way, shape, or form.

So in the next section, we're going to try to help you with that. I recently had, I think, a dopamine experience worth sharing. I need you to tell me if I'm doing this right, Mike. All right. So I've talked on the show about how I started playing an online role-playing game, a Star Wars online role-playing game, because I'm a nerd, and I just wanted to have something fun to do, and that seemed like it would be the thing.

But role-playing games are the worst about dopamine hits, and they came out with a new armor for my Jedi, right? And in order to get it, you had to accumulate so many tech fragments. That's the term in the game. And to get those, you had to run certain missions. And for a couple of weeks, almost every night, not every night, but almost almost every night i would log into the game and for about an hour play the game and and run some missions to get these tech fragments and then after a couple weeks of this i got enough tech fragments i bought the piece of armor i needed and my overall character got better by a fraction of a percent and And suddenly I had no desire to play any of the missions or the game at

all for about two weeks. And I realized that must be a dopamine thing. Like I was getting the hit every time I got those tech fragments, I got what I wanted. And then like, and then it just stopped, the drug stopped flowing, you know? Yeah. Well, I'm not a psychologist, not a doctor, but it sounds to me like you, they painted a picture of what you were going to get and the anticipation of getting that thing. That's what produced the dopamine and caused you to keep coming back. Yeah. And it's not just role-playing games that is an issue. Everything has this. I mean, I've kind of rethought the defaults on my iPhone

after we talked to Shahid, and I've removed a lot of the games and things, but I've got Duolingo on my phone, and I've got a Duolingo streak where I'm learning Spanish using that app, and it's like a 178-day streak now. But I get the same, I get the notifications saying your streak is in danger. You need to log in, you need to get your 20 experience points or whatever. So it's, it's not, you know, it's, it's the fact that things are doing that isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's

that all of the things will default to doing that. And if we just leave the door open, that's where we can feel ourselves achieving that state of overload. Well, I think attention overload is a real problem. And I think it can send you down some of these trouble areas. But we've got some ideas on how to help fight attention overload. We'll talk about it right after this. how to help fight attention overload. We'll talk about it right after this. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Blinkist. Read over 3,000 books in 15 minutes or less. Start your seven-day free trial. Just go to Blinkist.com slash Focus. So let me tell you about Blinkist. It's one of my most useful apps on my phone. It can be hard to find time to read.

one of my most useful apps on my phone. It can be hard to find time to read. We all have attention issues, right? And so when you're super busy, it's hard to work on personal development. Blinkist takes the best key takeaways and the need to know information from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them into just 15 minutes for you to read or listen to. Successful people are known for reading a lot of books. With Blinkist, you can finish a book during your commute, lunch break, or while you do the dishes. I like Blinkist. I take a lot of walks.

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And then you can also read it on the Blinkist app too. So my workflow is I listen to it once while I take the walk, then I get back, I sit down with a piece of paper, I read the book in the Blinkist app, and I take some notes of ways I think it can help me. Now, I know that's not getting you the full value and you're not reading the whole book, but boy, you get a lot out of it that way. And then tomorrow I can do another book. So it's just awesome. If you want to give Blinkist a try, why not find out how great leaders inspire action with Simon Sinek's Start With Why? Or learn about how successful nations recover from trauma. Check out Upheaval, Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond.

That one's actually on my playlist. I'm going to be listening to that soon. There's so many great books out there, and Blinkist has covered a lot of them, 3,000 plus. With Blinkist, you get unlimited access to read or listen to a massive library of condensed nonfiction books. That's all the books you want and all for one low price. Right now, for a limited time, Blinkist has a special offer just for the focused audience. Go to Blinkist.com slash focused to try it free for seven days and save 25% off your new subscription. That's Blinkist, spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T dot com slash focused,

F-O-C-U-S-E-D to start your free seven day trial. We talk a lot about a lot of stuff on the show. Why not listen to the Blinkist books on these subjects and see if you can't get a little bit more help. And you also save 25% off, but only when you sign up at Blinkist.com slash focused. Our thanks to Blinkist for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM. All right, so let's make this a little bit more positive. Let's talk about some of the things that you can do to fight attention overload? I think one of the biggest problems

with attention overload is multitasking. So I think you need to start there. Yes, agreed. Multitasking is the probably number one culprit for this. And again, it's one of those things that doesn't seem like that big a deal until you realize that you're making everything harder than it has to be.

Again, doing research on this, I came across this study by Sophie Leroy. I think she's from the University of Minnesota. She did this study on what was happening with multitasking. And it wasn't you thinking about or doing multiple things at once. what she found was that you were actually context switching very quickly. So your attention is on this one thing, and then you switch to another thing, and your brain's just really good at jumping back and forth between those things. So what's the problem? If your brain is good at that, why is doing that all the time such a big deal? Well, because when you switch from one task to another, there's a little bit of your attention that stays on the previous task. It's called attention residue. And that adds up. The more that you do

this, the more residue you've got. And if you were to compare what you are actually able to get done multitasking, you are able to do significantly more if you would tackle the same tasks with a different approach of, I'm going to focus on this one thing, do that till it's done. Then I'm going to go to the next thing, do that until it's done. But we kind of feel like we've got to have our eyes up off of the thing that we're working on, scanning the horizon, looking for the next thing that's going to come into our field of vision that's urgent. And some work scenarios specifically, I understand that there's things that are going to happen

and there's not anything you can do about that. But everybody's got some area of their life where they've probably volunteered to operate this way and they could start to reclaim a little bit of margin

and fight back against the tension overload by stopping multitasking in those specific scenarios. Agreed. And it's interesting because if you read the studies on this, people think they're actually multitasking much better than they are. When people actually analyze how effective were you while you were multitasking, you were actually a lot less effective than you thought you were. You know, future Sparky should put away his socks and not be watching YouTube. That's a simple version, right? I mean, that, and honestly, I mean, there are things you do with the TV on, but, you know, it goes so much deeper than this. And people like try to bring it into their work life and do

significant work at the same time. And you're just, you're bending your brain into a pretzel, even though you don't realize it. And the big payoff that you think you're getting for it, you're not getting the payoff. So it's just a win-win to stop multitasking. And I know right now there are people listening saying, oh, but I'm different. I'm really good at multitasking. You know i i'm married to a person that keeps arguing with me about how good she is at multitasking and i'm like just read the studies just yeah i mean just read this i know it's easy to think you're good at this but nobody is well that brings up an interesting point be i'm glad you brought up the sock example again because a friend of the show, Chris Bailey, has in his book Hyperfocus a little bit different take on multitasking. He introduces in that book the concept of attentional space, which is the RAM

that is in your brain's computer. And he argues that you can multitask in some way, shape, or form if you have the right combination of things that you are trying to do. So you can do one complex task, which is kind of what we were talking about. But you can also do a task that requires most of your focus plus a habitual task. And you could make the argument that folding the socks is a habitual task. And you could make the argument that folding the socks is a habitual task. You don't need to have all of your attention on the socks that you are folding. So you could, in that scenario, I would argue, watch YouTube while you're doing the socks. And that's no problem. But then you've opened up the door to the next thing and the next thing and the next

thing. And that leads to the situation you were describing earlier where I was done folding socks a long time ago and I didn't recognize that I got sucked into this algorithm. And YouTube's showing me all these videos that I had no intention of watching. I'm a little torn on that, honestly, because I used to spend quite a bit of time at a local Zen center and I would do these retreats, these meditation retreats. And one of the time at a local Zen center and I would do these retreats as meditation retreats. And one of the jobs at a meditation retreat, in addition to meditation quite often is they give you manual labor, you know, and I, I remember one time I, you know, it's always interesting that the head teacher's job is to clean the toilet just kind of as a sign of, okay, everybody's in on this. And the head person gets the worst job. But, you know,

so I would work in the garden. I would, you know, I remember one time I painted a door and the whole point of the exercise wasn't to paint the door. It was to just paint the door. It was to sit there and get the paint and do a mindful job of painting the door. And I really think that there's something to that. So I get where Chris is coming from. And honestly, I generally agree with almost everything Chris says. So I get that. And in fact, I did that yesterday when I turned on YouTube and folded my socks. But I also think there's real merit if you haven't developed the practice of doing things that seem like they have zero bandwidth, but just thinking about doing those

things and try that as an experiment. Because the whole point of this, I think, in a lot of ways, is slowing your brain down enough to give you that space between action and reaction. And I think exercises like that are the kind that will help you get there. I completely agree. I did want to call it out, though, because that's always the thing that people will push back on is like, oh, so when you're at the gym, do you listen to a podcast? Well, yes, I do. I'm not just lifting things up and putting things down. Or if I'm mowing the lawn, I'm listening to something. And that's an example of this combining, you know, something that is a habitual task and something that requires more of your focus.

task and something that requires more of your focus. But I do agree that the general rule should be to just focus on the one thing. We tend to think like, well, I can do one more thing in addition to this. And if you're going to set yourself up for success, the safer approach is to say, no, I'm just going to do this one thing and everything else is going to wait, especially for anything that's important. Yeah. And I think that's the thing is everybody has to figure out where they draw the line. I remember when I first started practicing meditation, I asked a teacher, so does this mean when I drive the car, I shouldn't be listening to music or listening to the radio? This is before podcasts. And she said, well, you got to decide that, you know, and it really was good feedback, because I think there certainly are things when you get to very line and you go over it, you pay a real price. And everybody listening can think of a silly thing like folding socks and watching YouTube.

But you can also think of things you do in your daily life that you really shouldn't be multitasking. And I think it depends on the level of your doing. And it's a decision you have to make personally. But I think you should err on the side of no multitasking. Agreed. That's definitely the safer approach for sure. Next one would be to take a break. And this does not mean the way I envision this anyways. You are working on something and so you're going to take a break and you're going to go shift your attention to something else. Go play video games or whatever. going to go shift your attention to something else, go play video games or whatever. There's value in that to the state switching. But when I say take a break, I am saying stop the inputs

and just be. Kind of the next point is be okay with being bored. Not looking to fill the void with more stuff, more information, just because you're craving something or you want to see what happened on social media while you were gone. Resist the urge to look at those things and just go for a walk or something. I do that when it's nicer. Currently, we got a whole bunch of snow, so I don't walk as much in the Midwest here in the winter. But in the spring, summer, fall, I will just go for a walk, get out by the trees and the streams that are kind of by my house. And I find just walking past those, being in nature, that kind of changes my state and

helps me reset and calm down. And when I come back, even if it's only for 10 minutes or so, I feel much more energized and ready to do what I got to do next. Another good one is if you're a coffee nerd or a tea nerd, go make coffee, go make tea, but just make coffee or tea. Don't put the TV on, you know, pay attention to the process of making the coffee, then pay attention to the taste of the coffee and just be with the coffee for 10 minutes and then go back and you'll be amazed how refreshed you feel. It's like a magic trick. Be with the coffee. You're speaking my language.

Yeah, I thought I would if I added coffee to it. For me, it's tea, but it's the same thing. Yeah. Another one on this list. This is something I picked up from Sean I added coffee to it. For me, it's tea, but it's the same thing. Another one on this list. This is something I picked up from Sean Blanc a while ago. He mentioned fighting the just checks. And that really hit me. His original post was, he was talking about the experience of waiting in line at the grocery store or something. And he's got just 30 seconds before the line moves and he's able to pay, but he finds himself

wanting to pull out his phone and check Twitter in those instances instead of just being where he is. And I am totally guilty of that. So I have tried to design systems in my life which will fight back against these just checks for me because I know that I'm bad at this, like removing social media off of my phone, removing email off of my phone so that it's a lot, there's a lot more friction. I can still get to those things if I really wanted to, but there's a lot more friction to do. So I have to go to the website and log in. And I don't want to do that when I've only got a short period of time. So that kind of

helps me fight back and maintain that, that space and just be where I am noticing what's going on around me. Yeah, that's a good one. Next one, notice what you notice or document what has your attention. This is where one of my action items is coming from is I want to recognize what I am paying attention to at different points in my day. And I heard somebody at one point mention the strategy of creating a notification which just asked you every hour on the hour, what has your attention? And if you wanted to automate this in something like shortcuts and journal all that stuff into day one, that would be valuable. But for me, I just want the prompt. I want to look at it. I don't even want to respond to it. I just want to see the question and have to answer it for myself and say, I was focused on my work project or, oh, I was checking Twitter when I should have

been working on my work project. And so I just want to kind of get a rough feel for how I'm doing those things. If you really wanted to nail this same principle as time tracking, you know, get all the data and then look at it. But for me, I just want the high level feel of what I'm really paying attention to. And I think the prompts are enough for me to do that. kind of scratches the same itch. I want to track that I'm actually keeping my attention where it belongs. And somewhat related is the practice of time blocking. I mean, one way to wrangle your attention is to put it in boxes, you know, and say, okay, I'm going to have an hour to work on podcast prep, or I'm going to have an hour to work on this contract. And that's what this hour is for. And that's where my attention should be. It doesn't always mean your attention complies, but at least you're creating an environment

where it's easier to comply. And somewhat related, you were talking about the just checks earlier. I think if you've got something in your life that really does pull at you often, Instagram is a good one. You know, what are my friends taking pictures of? And it's very easy to constantly be on Instagram.

And if that's a problem for you and it's preventing you from keeping your attention where it belongs, put a box around it. You know, just say like, you know, every night from 9 to 930, I'm going to go into Instagram and I'm going to check up on all my friends for the day. And maybe I'll add a post for something I did fun that day, but rather than putting in, you know, 10 minutes of time, you know, nine times giving it 90 minutes of the day, which is what happens for a lot of folks is, so I'm going to give it 30 minutes and it's going to be in this box. It's going to be at nine o'clock every night. And it'll be a fun thing to do rather than watching something dumb on TV. You can turn a negative into a positive that way, but you have to put a box around it if you can't control it. Nice. I like that one. I agree that if you can schedule these things, that's a great way to put

constraints around them and make sure that they don't bleed over and dominate more of your attention or more of your time than you intended. So it doesn't mean you have to put folding socks on your calendar, but if that's something that you struggle with repeatedly, then that is a strategy that would probably help you overcome that. Yeah, and that's like the straw man argument against the time blocking. I think that it's not, yeah, I mean it in a bigger way overcome that. Yeah. And that's like the straw man argument against the time blocking. I think that it's not, you know, I mean it in a bigger way than that. You know, there are some things in your life that really move the needle that you're not getting done and you put them on your calendar and then you do them and then you're keeping your attention where it belongs. Yeah.

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Both of us have been thinking a lot about attention overload as we've been developing the show. And we both have thought of some ways to help improve our own struggles in the battle. So I thought it'd be fun to share some of those and how we're going to do it. Yeah.

So I mentioned the big one for me as I was going through this. This is the one that just jumped off the page is the hourly what has your attention prompt. And I'm going to do this during work hours specifically. I will probably extend this a little bit beyond the nine to five, but I also don't want it just going off all the time to the point where I start ignoring it either. So I'm going to start implementing this with the workday and then probably extend it to maybe 8 p.m. because I do want to make sure that when I am done working

and I'm with my family that I can honestly say my attention is on my family and I'm not doing something stupid like surfing social media because that's not what I want to be doing. It's not my intention at that particular time. Yeah, I would really recommend that you extend this throughout your day because you want to be looking at where you're spending your attention when you're not at work too. that's almost more important in some ways. So I learned this exercise. I'm talking a lot about my Zen teachers today, but one of the first exercises I was given when I started meditating for real was, the idea is how do you pull mindfulness into the rest of your life? And the exercise I was given at the time was the telephone. Every time the telephone rings, in the moment that you hear the ringer go off, ask yourself,

at that moment that the ringer went off, was I mindful of where I was? You know, if I was working on a contract, was my head there writing the contract? If I was eating a banana, was my brain eating a banana? You know, or was I off in some other place? Just to kind of do as a check on yourself. This was a long time ago, and people called each other a lot more then. I think to bring that into modern times, I would say anytime my phone gives me a notification alert. So rather than have an hourly prompt, just remember every time your phone buzzes or your wrist vibrates or your phone rings, just ask yourself, just take a moment to say, was I doing what I was doing,

if that makes any sense. And I think I'm going to do that again. It's been a few years since I did that. Occasionally I redo that exercise. I'm going to do it as well. But instead of a prompt, I'm going to use notifications. Nice. I think of a prompt, I'm going to use notifications. Nice. I think that makes a lot of sense. I definitely don't get enough phone calls or even text messages for that to accomplish what I really want, which is a more frequent check on where my attention is. But I think that that's a great place to start for a lot of people without creating another

system, another thing that you have to have to do. Yeah. And don't judge yourself too harshly. We're humans. This is hard. But just the practice of asking yourself the question is going to help push you in the right direction. And trust me, at the beginning, you're going to find that rarely is your brain where the rest of your body is. And that's the valuable part is recognizing that, oh, I'm not doing as great as I thought I was because there's a lot of room for improvement now. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to trimming that stuff that's dominating your attention. That's kind of where my next action item is, is that I want to consider where to insert

gatekeepers. And I use the term gatekeeper because I have experience doing phone sales with the family business. And always the person that you would want to speak to had a secretary. And you would have to, the secretary, the term for the secretary in the marketing world is the gatekeeper. If they like your message, if they think it's going to help the person that they're working for, they're going to pass you through. But if not, they're going to screen you out. That's literally their job. And so I like the concept of gatekeepers in that sense, as it pertains to ways that people and things can get my attention specifically during my workday. I recognize that the workday is the thing that if I can really nail those eight hours, it makes everything else work. It's when I'm not, when I do a bad job of managing

my attention and my time during the workday and it starts to bleed over and I'm not wrapping up at 5 p.m., that's when I get stressed and when my attention is elsewhere instead of the thing that's important when I get off of work. So that's the battleground I need to fight in. But I like this idea of inserting the gatekeepers through all of the different ways that people might get my attention. So as an example, SaneBox for email. I've been using SaneBox for a long time, but that's essentially what I want to do with everything that I would use to allow information into my field of attention or focus. With SaneBox, it's going to cut out everything that isn't important, and it's only going to

show you the things that you would typically respond to. It's going to learn out everything that isn't important and it's only going to show you the things that you would typically respond to. It's going to learn over time that these are the types of things that I should let through. These are the types of things that can go to stain later or spam and I never have to look at them. And I don't know exactly what that means for text messages or Twitter or any of those sorts of things that I don't just use for personal, for fun stuff. I mean, Twitter is how I get a lot of my news. I don't like any of the big news sources, but I also want to make sure that I'm not just

scrolling through the timeline either. So what are the things that I can do to kind of curate that sort of stuff? So I only see the stuff that's important when I want to see it. Yeah, that's good. I'm curious to hear how you implement that. I think that one is going to take some thinking. Yes. For me,

just, you know, you're always, you know, what's the most recent battles, the one that you're always fighting? And I took on some projects that I shouldn't have that took too much of my time and attention and it screwed up everything else. You know, I went through the whole process and and now I finish those up and I'm looking back at it like, you know, how did that car accident happen and how can I prevent it in the future? And I really want to be more careful about attention overload going forward. And for me, attention overload quite often is the result of saying yes when I should say no. So what I did was, as I was finishing up some projects, I wrote a letter to myself about kind of, in essence, attention overload and how I got underwater by saying yes when I should have said no. And just, I've kept a letter. Now,

yes when I should have said no. And just, I've kept a letter. Now, we all have the little voice when we get asked to do something. And the little voice says, are you sure you want to do that? You know, and then you always find ways to get around the little voice. You know, like, for me, I've got daughter number one getting ready to start graduate school, daughter number two getting ready to start college. And I'm like, you know, little voice, be quiet. I need to to make money i'm going to say yes to some stuff i because you know i need to do it you know and uh that little voice is is usually right so i i wrote myself a letter i'm gonna and now you have a practice where whenever the little voice starts talking i'm going to go back and read that letter and then make a decision whether or not i'm going to take a project on that's outside the wheelhouse and um then the other thing I've been thinking about, because all this talk about multitasking,

I've been more conscious of my multitasking, except for the sock fiasco. And one of the things I notice is quite often, I'll watch TV and at the same time, be on my iPad or play a video game or something. And, and so really neither item gets the attention. Like if I play a video game for fun, I'm not getting the full fun out of it because I've got TV distracting me. Um, if there's a TV show I like, but I'm reading the iPad at the same time, I'm not getting the things I want out of the TV show because I'm letting the iPad distract me. So I've just decided I'm not going to watch any TV program that's not worth my full attention. If it's something that is so, you know, middle of the road that I think, well, I could go ahead and read my iPad now, then I'm not going to watch it and

I'll read my iPad. And the flip side is true as well. Like if there's something that I want to do on my iPad, I'm not going to screw it up by trying to watch TV at the same time. So I'm trying to, in terms of media consumption, I'm trying to be more deliberate and less scatterbrained. And the other piece of my life that I feel like I need to improve my anti-multitasking muscles is dealing with other humans. I'm very good, I think, when I'm with somebody. Like if you're standing across from me, my attention is on you and your words. But I spend a lot of time on the phone. Very easy when you're on the phone to be doing something in the background. I want to make a rule that when I'm talking to any other human, no matter what the medium, I'm going to give them my full attention. And that's a starting place. I like that one a lot. Cool. All right. Attention overload, man. It's a thing. It is a thing. And hopefully we've

given you some things to think about so you can identify for yourself what is contributing to your attention overload. And you've got some strategies, hopefully, to help you fight against it. If you need a little help, join us in the forum. There's a lot of other very smart folks over there who are fighting their own attention overload. folks over there who are fighting their own attention overload. And that's one of the valuable things I've found from the forum is that people have different ideas and what works for me may not work for David, vice versa. And the more ideas that you get, the more likely you are to find something that really just clicks. So don't try to apply all of it. But when you find the thing that really does move the needle for you, it's a worthwhile investment.

And it's also just value in seeing some fellow travelers on this stuff. I mean, we talk about it on the show, but there's a lot of folks out there fighting these same battles. You're not alone. Get in the forum so you know you're not alone. It'll help. Exactly. All right.

We are the Focus Podcast. You can find us over at Exactly. All right. We are the Focus podcast. You can find us over at relay.fm slash focus. The forums that Mike was just

talking about over at talk.macpowerusers.com. We've got our own little wing of the Mac Power Users forums. Thanks to our

sponsors, Ahrefs, Blinkist, and Pingdom, and we'll see you in a couple weeks.