Beyond time management: strategies for better attention management

However, this may also not be a bad thing: I already quoted Burkeman last time, who pointed out: "the (attention) control we have is too weak to simply decide to resist temptation."

But mainly because, and here we come to the real point, there is at least one aspect of our brain functioning that pushes towards the hypothesis that it is not (just) bad. If 'stolen' attention goes into distractions understood as wandering or di-wandering, then practising 'blind variation with selective preservation' is a formidable tool for creativity (even on social media, if we can occasionally loosen the meshes of the algorithms, which tend to leave us in our bubble and always make us see the things we already know we want to see).

This mechanism is probably well known to those of us in the profession who have 'creative' aspects. In the face of the blank page, which applies not only to writers but to anyone who needs to come up with an idea, from how to increase sales in a new market to how to make a budget report more readable, the somewhat vacuous distraction becomes a real strategy. It has two components: one dysfunctional, to escape from the sense of inadequacy we feel by failing to create when we 'should'; the other functional, to make us come back from the digression refreshed and with some sketch of a solution.

Sure, the possibility of scrolling through a few socials easily pushes us towards the endless sense of escapism, but it's not as if in decades past there weren't seemingly equally useless ways to distract ourselves.

How to defend oneself, however, so as not to risk being swallowed up by the social magma? Hemingway said that old people do not become wise. They become careful. Growing old might be a solution, but it takes time. In the meantime, what to do?

I tend to be reluctant to 'rules', which do not work in complex times, but sometimes they can have at least an inspirational role, and even some cause for amusement. Let me tell you the last one I read on the subject: how to regain concentration? Rule 1: eliminate distractions. Brilliant.

Here are a couple of others that I found more sensible and intriguing, taken from a book by Johann Hari, which is called 'The Stolen Attention'. It is a very broad text, and dealing with social, algorithms but also sleep quality, nutrition and more, it is hard to agree on everything. But among the 'six big changes' that the author has tried to introduce into his life to curb the problem, I mention 'use preventive efforts to stop changing activities so often'. This is followed by stratagems, including locking your smartphone in a time lock box. It jumped out at me that this is a suggestion in which time management, having gone out the door, comes back in through the window: it's called planning and scheduling: deciding how much time we are going to devote to doing something, allocating it in the diary and defending it at all costs.

And then another one: apart from mind-wandering (wandering with the mind, already mentioned, without which 'we find it harder to understand the world') I would say above all stop being ashamed, feeling guilty and blaming ourselves for laziness and distraction; instead, direct that energy, following the inspiration of psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, towards seeking flow (the flow) 'what can I do to get into a state of flow? What could I do now that would be meaningful to me? The search for the flow state is much more effective than self-punitive shaming'.

Finally, and here I come back to Burkeman, knowing how to choose, being aware of the fact that by now it is not a matter of being able to say no to the things we do not want to do and stop doing those, but that there are probably even too many things we would like to do (or think we want to do). And that really is a decision, in the etymological sense of the word de-caedĕre, to cut away.

Easy to say, but how? I had to choose too, so we will reflect on that in a future instalment.

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