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Attentional Austerity
By Rosie Perera | September 14, 2012 at 1:42 am
I sometimes joke that I have Attention Deficit Disorder. That isn’t literally true, but what is true is that there is too much that interests me, particularly online. I find myself following a never-ending flow of rabbit trails, finding articles I want to read but quickly skipping on to others that those ones linked to, before I’ve had a chance to read much. The result is I churn through so much of my day doing discovery, and flagging things to come back to, that I almost never get around to coming back, and I often don’t even get around to doing the important tasks I needed to get done that day.
I’m suffering not from attention deficit, but attention overload. I am engaging in what Linda Stone calls “continuous partial attention.”
Michael Sacacas proposes a discipline of “attentional austerity” as a corrective to the habits that keep us overloaded. He doesn’t give specific recommendations of practices that might foster attentional austerity. He merely calls us to it, and bets that “the advantage will go to the person who is able to cancel out the noise and focus with ferocity.” Yes, but how? How to say “no” when I find all this stuff so interesting?
I have several ways of keeping track of things I want to go back and read. One lazy method is to keep them open in tabs in my browser. My browser then gets cluttered with open tabs and I need to make notes of what they were before closing them. I used to keep a “To Read” folder of browser bookmarks. I’ve used Delicious to flag sites I want to go back and explore more. I was using the Read It Later app (now called Pocket) for a while (it lets you mark web pages while browsing on your computer that you can then read later on your tablet when you have some more of that elusive substance called “time”). For years I’ve also kept a kind of Internet “travelogue” file of links to interesting places I’ve stumbled upon that I might want to find again. In the beginning I even had time to write notes about each one and boldface the sites that had substantial content and might end up being good reference resources for me in the future. But now I barely have time to copy and paste the URLs. All of that “continuous partial attention” has left me feeling that “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.” I inevitably abandon the tools I was using to keep lists of reading matter.
What I am learning (I’m a slow learner) is that rather than all these tools to manage lists of what I want to come back to, I need to cut back on all the interesting things I might want to read later. I need to close browser tabs more frequently without reading them and without copying and pasting their URL somewhere for later.
One of the motivations for writing this blog post (apart from more procrastination on what I was really supposed to be doing today) was that many days ago I had opened several browser tabs stemming from Michael Sacacas’s interesting blog post on attentional austerity (which I actually did read), and it was time to close them and move on. I had kept them open because I wanted to blog about the topic. Well, I’ve done that now, so I can close the tabs.
Now next time I see something interesting that I want to blog about when I really should be doing something else, will I have the discipline to close the tab without making a note for myself to come back and read it or blog about it later? Oh, attentional austerity is so hard! Maybe I do have a touch of ADD after all.
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