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].