Attention, ignorance and emotion

If you keep getting distracted, perhaps it's time to embrace the concept of "critical ignoring".

One of the internet’s enduring myths concerns our attention span. Although it has been widely debunked as lacking any basis in science or research, the idea that our attention spans are shorter than ever lives on. This otherwise excellent article from ESPN on the endless Reels-ification of everything uses it as an entry point.

You can see why there’s an appeal for writers and creators - it’s a neat, easily understandable heuristic that proves a feeling we’ve all felt over the past ten years or so: the modern world makes it difficult to concentrate.

The challenge with this heuristic is that it underplays the complex nature of attention. In reading around the debunking of the “attention span myth”, I noted that several psychologists dispute the very concept of humans having an attention span.

Everyone can focus on a task at hand, just as we have the capacity to do certain things on autopilot while our mind wanders. It would be strange, and not to mention impractical, to divide our days into 20-second segments. It would also make the process of watching a movie or a 45-minute TV show challenging, to say the least.

That feeling of not being able to concentrate is likely born from the increased prevalence of distractions in our modern world. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve picked up my phone intending to do something specific but then become distracted by a notification, disappeared into a mini-iPhone wormhole, then completely forgotten to do the thing I opened my phone for in the first place.

Many office workers, especially in marketing and communications, interact with colleagues and clients on a variety of channels. At any one time, you have pings coming in from Slack, Teams, WhatsApp and emails.

To counter these myriad distractions, Cal Newport recommends developing a “Deep Work” strategy (as outlined in his excellent book of the same name). Newport’s central thesis is that our devices should be tools that we use to help us complete tasks and achieve our goals. The challenge is that the rise of the smartphone ushered in the age of notifications, and the endless pings from apps (an experience increasingly mirrored on desktop) means that our devices use us as much as we use them.

To take back control of our devices, Newport recommends a minimalist approach to notifications. Turn off as many as possible, keeping only the most critical news. I highly recommend this approach - I don’t get a notification every time I receive an email, for example. I don’t want the constant emails from a company called Captiv8 (seriously, how many domains do I have to block for you to get the message?) interrupting my flow. I limit myself to Slack DMs, meeting reminders, direct WhatsApps (not group chats), texts and phone calls. I check my email when I want - not the other way around. If something was urgent, I know someone would call or ping me a DM.

I know that many of you reading this may feel you don’t have that luxury—you work on busy, press office-type accounts where email traffic is high, for example. Even so, I would still strongly encourage you to turn off any notifications that aren’t essential. If you do find yourself feeling distracted during the day, there’s merit in being more deliberate with your attention. Choosing what gets your focus also means deciding what’s undeserving of your time.

There’s also an argument that the deliberate application of our attention, and being clear about what’s undeserving of our time has merit outside the world of work. A study from 2022 suggested in addition to practicing critical thinking, humans should also adopt behaviour they called “critical ignoring”. It’s essentially another name for being more intentional with how you spend your finite attention. It’s not about unplugging from the news or not paying attention to what’s happening in the world; “it’s about practising mindful and healthy habits in the face of information overabundance.”

The paper goes on to outline three tactics that we can adopt to practice critical thinking.

The first links to Cal Newport’s “don’t let your phone use you”-mantra. It’s called self-nudging, and it’s all about choosing notifications you receive and not just leaving your apps and services to default. It’s filtering out RTs and shares from your feeds and making time to scroll, not doing it absent-mindedly.

Secondly, the researchers suggest lateral reading - essentially fact-checking what you read by searching to see if it’s true. I did it with the attention span myth I mentioned above. It can help you mentally consign ideas to the bin, never to be thought of again.

The final tool will be familiar to anyone who’s dealt with a crisis over the past ten years: don’t feed the trolls. Don’t give anyone making a point to get into an argument the time of day - they want you to respond, to fuel the fire and (especially if you’re a brand or business) to provide legitimacy and attention to their cause.

There are signs that people have begun to be more selective in where they spend their attention. As the Reuters News Institute’s research has shown, swathes of the general public find the news too depressing and repetitive and, as a result, have begun actively avoiding it. We also know that Meta’s platforms have actively deprecated news stories and particularly links in users’ feeds based on feedback from the “community.”

But equally, plenty of stories explicitly designed to inflame emotions and deliberately provoke a response for the sake of provoking that response continue to catch on. Think of Russell Brand’s ridiculous anti-WiFi amulets or Mike Tyson taking Logan Paul this weekend. As human beings, we can’t help but be attracted to stories that engage our emotions. And no matter how much we may like to avoid getting angry at the fame-hungry YouTubers or pathetic alleged rapists in our feeds, they invariably end up creeping through.

And that’s arguably the thing with distraction - no matter how much we might want to remove it from our lives, there are still undeniably times when we crave it. Your call finishes a few minutes early, so you check in to see which brand is the latest to leave Twitter (the Clifton Suspension Bridge & Museum is out). You need some respite after a long day at work, so you lose yourself in an algorithmic video wormhole. Intentional distraction has its benefits; it just needs control and moderation.

While a post from a brand or business might generally be easy to ignore, there’s no reason they can’t be in the mix for your intentional distraction. And the most straightforward path to making it into people’s feeds comes from focusing on generating an emotional reaction from your audience.

Think about Norwich City’s two recent suicide awareness campaigns for World Mental Health Day, both of which reduce me to tears every time I watch them.

Or the Resilience Road initiative from Australian insurer Suncorp, which highlights the urgent need for better prevention against extreme weather conditions.

Or a campaign I continually refer to from Starling Bank, where they stirred up righteous indignation by highlighting the gender inequality at play in how differently the media talks to men and women about money.

Stories like these resonate with us so much more than those grounded in the rational and factual. And in the brutal battle for attention, plenty of other people - creators, politicians or news organisations - already attempt to trigger our emotions to capture us in moments of distraction. If brands and businesses want to get in front of audiences they don’t usually reach and break out of being ignored, using similar approaches to capture attention can pay dividends.