In my last post about the future of attention, I brought up the question of attention as a scarce resource (the analogy from Michael Erard was to money). If you accept that, then a natural question is how to increase your amount of this resource, just like the an obvious economic question is how to get more money. (As soon as you start making analogies to economics, you start talking about pie, and so we have the attention pie.)

Michael Erard brought up the interesting question of increasing the size of the pie, rather than optimizing the allocation of the pie slices. It's good to draw some boundaries around the question of increasing the attention pie. It would seem that the only way to literally increase the time available for attention would be to decrease the time not available to attention, which I suppose is time spent unconscious. We can include sleep in that (lucid dreamers, bite your tongues), and time when you're dead.

So less sleep or a longer life.... given what medicine knows about sleep, it could be that less sleep shortens your life, so maybe that's a zero sum game. I think we can certainly say that time spent on "preventive medicine" such as eating healthy and exercising is a likely boost in your long-term attention pie.

The boost to the attention pie that got me excited was not so literal. There is the amount of time spent inattentively (or, with my BubbleTimer hat on, I might say unintentionally) and there is the question of the quality of the attention. The boost to the attention pie I first considered was time spent inattentively, but the quality of attention is very interesting, how do you improve that?

It would seem that quality of attention and length of attention are strongly correlated. There are the studies on getting into the creative zone (as opposed to the athletic zone of elite athletes) and how much time that takes (early consensus seems to say 15 minutes) and how easy it is to be interrupted.

So, at Ian Varley's prompting,  I've clarified the question a bit. It's not a question of literal conscious time available but more a question of how that time is allocated across inattention, low-quality attention and high quality attention.

One last note before I wrap, I may have misread this quote from Michael Erard because even though we are talking about the same thing, I think he maybe missing a key word or two:

We need...someone to inspire us away from the fight over smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie. Someone who will inspire us to make the attention pie bigger.

He talks about smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie, really a complaint about attention fragmentation, but then says the answer is making the attention pie bigger. I think we can restate this quote to better fit our revised question this way:

We need...someone to inspire us away from the fight over smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie. Someone who will inspire us to make the attention pie [slices] bigger[, better and intentionally allocated].

It's been awhile since I've made a post on Being and Time. My apologies. I've been writing a book and struggling with some time management issues of my own (the same issues that led me to create BubbleTimer). Having said that, I have also been inspired in the last couple of weeks with some really great stuff I've been reading about the broader and more philosophical questions of time management. I've got the itch back to write here. This is after-all the worlds only blog about the Philosophy of Time Management (as far as I know), and there is nothing like writing (and responding to feedback) to clarify your own thoughts.

One of the articles that captured my attention (pun intended) recently is "A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention" by Michael Erard. It's a provocative article that describes a possible future economy based on attention rather than money. I don't think this will come to fruition, and I don't think Michael does either, it's more of a thought experiment. But there are some true gems in the short article that I'd like to point out and respond to.

In 1971, the oft-quoted political scientist Herbert Simon predicted that in an information age, cultural producers (that's designers, but also filmmakers, theater types, musicians, artists) would quickly face a shortage of attention. "What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients," he wrote. The more information, the less attention, and "the need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."

Herbert Simon was clearly ahead of his time. His words, which might have seemed a little whacky in 1971 (I wasn't alive, I assume they would have), have come true.

We need...someone to inspire us away from the fight over smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie. Someone who will inspire us to make the attention pie bigger.

These are two sentences that you could easily spend an entire year unraveling, if not a whole career. There is a lot of philosophy, research, experimentation and engineering that could (and should) go on in response to these 2 sentences.

First, philosophical: Is it possible to make the attention pie bigger? Does that conceptually even make sense? What would a bigger attention pie be like? Would it be a positive development?

If you made sufficient progress on the philosophical questions, you would understand the problem enough to move onto some research. Has anyone tried this something like this? What success did they have... what worked? What failed? Unless your research led you to an answer that had been hypothesized and proven through experiment, but that nobody knows about (in which case you'd go into evangelism mode), your next step would be to design some experiments informed by the philosophy and the research to see if it is in fact possible to grow the attention pie.

Some successful experiments in making the attention pie bigger would lead me to immediately try to create one or more practical implementations, since ultimately, I'm of two minds, the philosopher and the engineer, and I have an innate drive to create practical solutions.

Skipping some of Michael's thoughts on attention festivals and a possible attention economy (both seem just a bit whacky to me), Michael does get to some comments about possible practical solutions in the form of attention related software.

I imagine software, a smartphone app, perhaps, you can use to audit your attentional expenditures. So that before you embark on trying to write a book, you will be able to see how much time you spent reading books over the last month or year. So that before you design a marketing campaign that assumes that people aren't doing much else with their time until you show up, you will be able to see what you yourself were doing with your time, which was something perfectly good. This will show you that you're a savvy allocator of your attentional resources — and so is everybody else.

BubbleTimer and some other software solutions are very early attempts to provide attentional software. I'm writing this right now in WriteRoom, an attempt, via software, to engineer human attention. Another attentional (is that a word?) application I was just made aware of is Think. What do you think (will the puns ever stop?) about these early attempts? Are they on the right track? If so, what's missing? What's the next step? And, as is always important to me, how do we take that next step but keep the tools so simple and fun that people actually want to use them?

I'll wrap up for now by returning the bigger question. Do we need to make the attention pie bigger rather than worry so much about how we allocate the fixed pie? I'm not sure yet since I'm still at step 1, unsure if the concept of a bigger attention pie makes any sense. If I only had more time to pursue this... oh, the irony.