The link between attention and excellence remains hidden most of the time. Yet attention is the basis of the most essential of leadership skills—emotional, organizational, and strategic intelligence.
And never has it been under greater assault. The constant onslaught of incoming data leads to sloppy shortcuts—triaging our e-mail by reading only the subject lines, skipping many of our voice mails, and skimming memos and reports. Not only do our habits of attention make us less effective, but the sheer volume of all those messages leaves us too little time to reflect on what they really mean.
This was foreseen more than 40 years ago by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon. Information “consumes the attention of its recipients,” he wrote in 1971. “Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
We should be thankful for our ability to multitask. If we couldn’t shift our mental gears quickly, we wouldn’t be able to have a conversation while cooking a meal, listen to music while composing an email, or walk and chew gum at the same time. Life would be dull.
But as neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains in the excerpt below, multitasking can all too easily become pathological. When we expend too much of our mental energy skipping from one thing to the next, we cut ourselves off from the highest forms of thought our brains are capable of. Conceptual and critical thinking, insight, and ingenuity emerge only when we screen out distractions and focus our minds.
Turning off the multitasking instinct is becoming ever more difficult. Our modern technological environment seems designed to scatter our attention. But making the effort to escape the informational whirlwind remains essential.
Our brains employ two modes of thinking to tackle any large task: focused and diffuse.
Professor Barbara Oakley, is credited with popularizing the concept of focused and diffuse forms of thinking. In A Mind for Numbers, Oakley explains how distinct these modes are and how we switch between the two throughout the day. We are constantly in pursuit of true periods of focus – deep work, flow states, and highly productive sessions where we see tangible results. Much of the learning process occurs during the focused mode of thinking. The diffuse mode is equally important to understand and pursue.When our minds are free to wander, we shift into a diffuse mode of thinking. This is sometimes referred to as our natural mode of thinking, or the daydream mode; it’s when we form connections and subconsciously mull over problems.
Oakley uses evolutionary biology to explain why we have these two distinct modes. Vertebrates need both focused and diffuse modes to survive. The focused mode is useful for vital tasks like foraging for food or caring for offspring. On the other hand, the diffuse mode is useful for scanning the area for predators and other threats.
Both modes of thinking are equally valuable, but it’s the harmony between them that matters. We can’t maintain the effort of the focused mode for long. At some point, we need to relax and slip into the diffuse mode. Learning a complex skill —a language, a musical instrument, chess, a mental model—requires both modes to work together. We master the details in focused mode, then comprehend how everything fits together in diffuse mode. It’s about combining creativity with execution.
We should be thankful for our ability to multitask. If we couldn’t shift our mental gears quickly, we wouldn’t be able to have a conversation while cooking a meal, listen to music while composing an email, or walk and chew gum at the same time. Life would be dull.But as neuroscientist
Daniel Levitin explains in the excerpt below, multitasking can all too easily become pathological. When we expend too much of our mental energy skipping from one thing to the next, we cut ourselves off from the highest forms of thought our brains are capable of. Conceptual and critical thinking, insight and ingenuity emerge only when we screen out distractions and focus our minds.
Turning off the multitasking instinct is becoming ever more difficult. Our modern technological environment seems designed to scatter our attention. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect distraction machine than a smartphone. But making the effort to escape the informational whirlwind remains essential. A calm mind is a fruitful mind. The owl is wiser than the magpie.
In the English language, we are said to “pay” attention, which plainly implies that the process extracts a cost. Research on cognitive functioning shows us the form of the fee: when attention is paid to something, the price is attention lost to something else. Indeed, because the human mind appears able to hold only one thing in conscious awareness at a time, the toll is a momentary loss of focused attention to everything else.
The best we can do to handle multiple channels of information is to switch back and forth among them, opening and closing the door of mindfulness to each in turn. This skill allows for multitasking, the ability to focus on several activities in the same time frame—perhaps talking on the phone while reading an email message. Although it might seem that we are concentrating on more than one thing simultaneously, that’s an illusion. We are just rapidly alternating our focus. However, just as there is a price for paying attention, there is a charge for switching it: For about a half second during a shift of focus, we experience a mental dead spot, called an attentional blink, when we can’t register the newly highlighted information consciously.
We rightly believe that what they choose to attend to (or away from) reflects what they value at the time.
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