My goal with this blog

I write about relevant changes in the way that people use the web and how startups are built to provide services and products for this ever changing wonderful thing we still know as "the web." As a former entrepreneur turned early-stage investor, my greatest hope is for this to be useful to other folks that are like me in the hopes that they can avoid some of the mistakes I've made.

From:
Antonio Rodriguez

The vanishing attention span, or why it's getting more difficult to concentrate

tech
by Antonio on

This past weekend I saw a story on Hacker News about something that has been bothering me more and more over the last two years: our perpetually receding attention span in the digital era.

As I think about my own dwindling attention span over the last couple of years, I can find three main culprits:

1. A big company corporate job: this is a recipe for carving your day into thinner slices than tuna at a cheap sushi bar. I don't come from many meeting heavy work environments so the past two years have been sort of boiling frog phenomenon in that respect. By the time you subtract the meeting time and the context-switching 5-10 minutes on either end, you've sliced your typical 8 hour day into the following array of potentially productive chunks of minutes: (15, 5, 20, 15). And what is worse, you have made yourself into an interrupt-driven machine.

2. Twitter/Facebook/Reddit (stream-based micropublishing): The torrent of "realtime" updates was really cool a couple of years ago when it was new, but lately I've come to realize that it is now the greatest excuse for distraction that was ever created. Linda Stone first wrote about "continual partial attention" a few years ago, mostly in reference to email, IMs, and SMS, but it applies even more so to all of these micropublished updates. The constant barrage preys upon our scarcity-tuned primate brains which convince us that we should never turn away for fear of missing that "next meal."

3. The smartphone: This last one is the most insidious because it slowly but surely takes over all of the white spaces in your life, from waiting at the doctor's office to sitting in line at the grocery store. In my case, I've found that the iPhone has had a great amplifying effect on 1-2 above in that it allows for those activities to be extended to moments when I'm away from the desktop and ostensibly not "at work."

It's too early to tell whether this is all necessarily bad, though it certainly doesn't feel healthy when it comes to intense concentration. Also, the cognitive load exerted by 2-3 is undeniable and makes me wonder the analogy of a PC, ground down by a bunch of background processes, doesn't equally apply to us.