I see two major (and opposite) approaches you could take when trying to be more deliberate with attention.
The first is to simply be much more selective about what event enters your awareness. This is the realm of digital minimalism (anyone else stoked for Cal’s book?), Essentialism, and the recent obsession with Marie Kondo and The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. This is the approach that resonates most clearly with the way my own brain works. I’ve been a minimalist in most ways for a long time and when I’m really feeling on top of my game I really have a lot of sources of information locked down.
The other approach is to care much less about restricting the streams of information that enter your life and instead be extremely comfortable dipping in and out of the streams at will. Folks who are really comfortable with this approach must not feel any obligation to keep up to date with these sources of information. They aren’t Twitter timeline completionists or Inbox Zero adherents. As Rands puts it in a recent podcast of his I listened to they’re good at “tasting the soup.”
I always discounted this way of operating but I’m becoming more and more interested in how I can adopt more of it. If I’m honest with myself, sticking to the minimalism approach of attention management sometimes feels like a losing battle. There’s a constant vigilance that can feel righteous and sacred on my good days and exhausting and Sysiphian on my bad days. How nice would it be to not care about following thousands of people on Twitter or worrying about the backlog of TV shows that you said you wanted to watch or letting the notifications pile up on Slack? Dip in, dip out, move on.
I look to something like Apple Music as an example. I have at my fingertips what seems like all music that has ever been created and tens of brand new albums and playlists algorithmically selected for me every day yet I don’t feel any overwhelming urge to “complete” Apple Music. It’s just a thing I use when I want to and forget about it the rest of the time. It makes me wonder what else I could treat more like that rather than as an open loop that I desperately need to close in order to feel better.
I’ve taken a small step in this direction over the past couple days. This probably sounds crazy to most people but I actually created projects in Things to keep track of which video games I was playing. I didn’t want to have too many in progress so I figured if I visualized how many I had “active” I would be less likely to try to tackle too many at once (which I know can make me feel scattered). To the surprise of no one, putting video games in your task management software is a great way to make them feel like work.
Can I extend this elsewhere? To Twitter? To RSS? To email and Slack? Who knows! Am Ion the verge of a digital rumspringa just in time for Digital Minimalism to come out and probably rock my world like everything else Cal Newport has written?
Stay tuned.
Links And Whatnot
• Rands, of Rands in Repose fame, rebooted his podcast called The Important Thing. I enjoyed its very short initial run and the new episodes are pretty good too. I particularly liked The One About Information Consumption (which is where I first heard the “tasting the soup” metaphor I mentioned above).
• In December I helped facilitate a session at the Work Awesome and Inbox Awesome conference. We kicked it off with a 10ish minute talk about The Ready and org design before breaking into groups to do an activity (which the video captures but I can’t imagine makes for very compelling viewing). We then reconvene at the end for a 10-15 minute discussion and Q&A. I’m pleasantly surprised at how the talk portion turned out.
• Should the long thing I wrote at the start of this newsletter be an article instead? I was thinking it’d be a good topic for a newsletter and then I started writing and writing and writing and it turned into something kind of long. Too long for a newsletter?
• I keep forgetting to mention that I try to do a daily “open office hour” everyday that anyone can sign up for by going to my Calendly link. If you’ve ever wanted to talk about The Ready or org design or positive psychology or hockey or anything else with me you should grab a slot and we’ll have a virtual coffee together.
• I love being pleasantly surprised. You know what recently surprised me? How good the TV show Letterkenny is. For what started as a goofy YouTube series about small-town Canadian life has turned into a still very goofy TV show about small-town Canadian life that has actually grown a heart and a pretty astute progressive voice. I’m naturally disposed to like it considering my Southeast Michigan upbringing (I’m pretty close to as Canadian as you can be as an American) and many years of hockey playing but I think anybody could actually love this show. You may need to leave the captions on and brush up on your hockey player lingo but if you give it a go (S1 and S2 are good, S3 is meh, and S4-6 are incredible) I think you might also be pleasantly surprised. It’s raunchy as hell so put the kiddos to bed before you pop it on.
• I DIDN’T MEAN TO WRITE THIS MUCH I’M SORRY.
Until next time,
Sam