Latest / The Mastery Project Podcast / Who Decides Where Your Attention Goes?
Transcript
- T-Michael Dougherty: You pick up your phone to check a text message. That's the entire plan. Just one message, maybe 10 seconds out of your day, and then back to whatever you were doing. Twenty minutes later, you are three apps deep into something you never even planned to do. And if someone asked you to identify the exact moment you decided to stop doing what you meant to do and start doing the thing you didn't intend to do, you'd probably have a difficult time finding it. Because there likely was no moment. There was almost certainly no conscious decision to abandon what you were working on. That was one easy action followed by another, and somewhere in that sequence your original intention became silently hijacked. Now most of us try to explain that experience in the same way. We tell ourselves we should have been more disciplined, we should have put the phone down, or we should have had more self control. And that explanation can appear to be correct because it's simple and because it puts the responsibility exactly where we would expect it to be on ourselves. But here's the part that should make you curious. If this were really a willpower problem, you'd probably remember the moment you gave in and got sidetracked, right? You'd be able to point to the decision, the instant you chose distraction over focus. And most of the time you can't do that because that's not actually what happened. Your attention didn't jump, it was moved, one small step at a time, within an environment that made it each next step easier than stopping. And once you start to see that, a much more interesting question about focus and attention opens up than whether you simply need more discipline. Who is actually deciding where our attention goes? Welcome to the Mastery Project Podcast, where we explore the research and evidence behind the science of learning, leadership, performance, and mindset in the continuous pursuit of mastery. I'm Dr. T. Michael Doherty. In this episode, I want to look at why digital environments are so easy to enter and sometimes surprisingly difficult to leave, why even an ignored notification from our phone can carry a cost, why screen time may be too blunt of a measure to tell us much about attention, and what changes when we stop treating distraction entirely as a failure of discipline and start paying attention to the conditions under which our choices are being made. And the first thing we need to reconsider here is the idea that this was primarily a willpower problem to begin with. So if distraction is not always a conscious decision, the next question we need to ask ourselves is what is actually driving the behavior? And a really good way to test the willpower explanation is to try a simple thought experiment. Imagine that you decide right now that you're not going to check your phone for the next hour. You're working on something important that matters to you, your phone is sitting on your desk, and Your goal is simply to leave it alone. For the first few minutes, that probably works fine. You're focused, the phone is irrelevant, and willpower seems like it's doing its job. But then your phone buzzes and you ignore it, which sort of feels good in the moment. But then you finish a paragraph and there's a two-second gap before you know what's coming next. And your eyes drift towards your phone. But you remind yourself that you're going to get distracted if you pick it up, so you pull them back. And then Your work starts to get slightly uncomfortable because you're stuck on something and the phone is right there in front of you. But then you remember a message you half saw earlier and start wondering what the rest of it said. Each of these moments is small and by themselves, none of them feels like a dramatic failure of willpower. But over the course of an hour, you might face 15 or 20 of these moments, and the phone doesn't win that contest because any single impulse overwhelmed you. It wins because the opportunity kept returning and And the cost of acting on it was almost zero. Now change one thing in that scenario and put your phone in another room. Same hour time block, same work, but now checking the phone means standing up, walking down the hall, picking it up, and then walking back. You could still do it, but nothing about your motivation has changed at all. Most people would check far less often because the environment stopped making the behavior easy. And that's precisely where the willpower explanation falls short. It treats self-control as though it operates in a vacuum, as though you either have enough of it or you don't. But in practice, self-control is constantly interacting with how easy or hard the environment makes the next action. We actually understand this in almost every other aspect of our lives. If you're trying to eat differently, you probably aren't going to put the food you're trying to avoid on the counter right in front of you and then congratulate yourself every hour for not eating it. Instead, you'd move it. You would make the thing you want to do easier and the thing you don't want to do slightly harder, and we call that good planning. But when it comes to our phones, we often abandon that same logic and turn the problem into a referendum on our character. Now, recognizing how easy or difficult something is can be an important first step, but it only explains why the phone is so easy to pick up. What it doesn't explain is what happens once you're already inside your phone. And that's because there's another aspect of this that The willpower concept can't touch. Sometimes we pick up our phones with a perfectly clear intention. We do the thing we came to do, and then 20 minutes pass anyway. The problem in that case was not that we didn't resist starting, the problem was that nothing told us when to stop. And that turns out to be a different kind of design problem entirely. One that begins with something older forms of media almost always provided, and that a lot of digital media that we use today has quietly removed by intention. Think about the way a lot of older forms of media worked. A newspaper always had a last page. A magazine article always has a definitive end. A television show ran for 30 minutes or an hour and then the credits rolled. Even on the early internet, you could reach the bottom of a web page and you'd have to decide whether you wanted to click something else. Those endings provided something useful even though nobody thought of them as a feature at the time. They created a moment in time in which continuing to engage with that page, article, or book required another decision. The decision didn't have to be dramatic. You didn't sit there and conduct a cost benefit analysis about whether to watch one more episode. But there was at least a break in the activity, a point where one thing was finished and before the next thing began, you had a brief opportunity to notice what you were doing and decide whether you wanted to keep doing it. That is what a stopping cue does, and we rely on them far more than we actually realize. There's a concept in behavioral research called unit bias, and it was demonstrated in a two thousand six study by Geyer et al. showing that people tend to treat whatever is presented to them as a unit as though it represented a reasonable amount to consume. Change the size of the portion or the package and how much of it you use tends to move with it. Eating pretzels and scrolling through Instagram are obviously not the same activity, but the broader idea is worth paying attention to. Boundaries help us decide when enough is enough. And when the boundaries change, our sense of enough can often change with them. A 2023 field study by Rixon and colleagues looked at this directly in the context of social media use. They tracked how people actually used infinite scroll applications over the course of a week and found that. Participants in their study consistently described the scrolling experience as a kind of loop, one that could extend their sessions well beyond what they initially intended. And what was particularly interesting was that when people did stop, the reason almost always came from outside the app, not from within it. A text alert would come in or they'd had to leave the house, or someone walked into the room and interrupted them. The application itself provided almost no reason to stop. That finding makes infinite scroll probably the cleanest example of what happens when you remove boundaries from a digital environment. With a traditional web page, eventually you reach the bottom. If you want more, you have to click another page. That's a tiny action, but it creates a decision point, a moment where the system is essentially asking you whether or not you want to continue. Infinite scroll removes that question entirely. If you move your thumb, more content appears. You move it again, more content appears again. There's no page two, no last item, and no natural point at which the environment tells you that you finished the thing you came to do. And the important part is not that infinite scroll somehow forces you to continue because it doesn't. The important part is that continuing no longer requires a new decision, while stopping does. That reverses the default because in the old design you had to choose to keep going. In the new model that involves digital media, you have to choose to stop. You can see the same principle at work in apps that have autoplay. Think about television before streaming was available to us. An episode ended, the credits rolled, and if you wanted to keep watching, you had to do something. Now the next episode begins automatically, something with a countdown that's already running before you've made up your mind. So the question is no longer do you want to start another episode? It's now something like do you want to stop the next next episode from starting? And those sound almost identical, but behaviorally they're not the same thing at all, especially at eleven thirty at night when you're tired and the opening scene's already playing and you you think, well, one more episode's not gonna hurt, plus it's already started, so I might as well. And this also helps explain something that most people have noticed, but rarely even think about carefully or even understand, which is that time can become strangely difficult to track in these environments. If you read three chapters of a book, you know you read three chapters. If you watch two episodes of a show on TV, you know you watched two episodes. But what exactly is the unit of scrolling? Twenty posts? Forty? Eight minutes? Thirty seven? There's no obvious unit, which means there's no obvious sense of completion. And without a sense of completion, just a little bit more becomes very easy to accept because there is no clear boundary between what you just consumed and what comes next. When we talk about managing attention, we usually focus on resisting the beginning part of a distraction. Don't pick up the phone, don't open the app, and don't click the video. But there's an equally important question about the architecture of the ending of a distraction, because a system that's very easy to enter and provides no obvious reason to leave creates a different behavioral problem than something that simply catches your eye for just a moment. And once we understand that. Another piece of the puzzle becomes easier to see as well. Because not every interruption requires you to open an app, watch a video, or start scrolling in order to grab your attention. Sometimes the interruption lasts only a second. Your phone may light up, you hear a sound, or you see a notification, but you decide not to touch it. And you might reasonably assume that because you ignored it, nothing actually happened. It was harmless and you beat the potential distraction, right? But attention doesn't work quite that cleanly. Most of us think there's an important difference between receiving a notification and actually responding to it. Your phone buzzes while you're working, you notice it, but you leave it sitting there and keep going. From the outside, that looks like a successful act of self-control. The phone tried to distract you, you ignored it, and therefore nothing really happened. The problem with that is that your attention may already have shifted before you made the decision not to respond. And that's because interacting with something and attending to it. Are not the same. You don't have to pick up the phone, open the message, or read an email for the notification itself to interrupt what you were doing. The sound, the vibration, the banner, the screen lighting up, those are all telling your brain that something in your environment has changed and that it might be worth investigating. Our attentional systems are very good at doing exactly that for us. If somebody says your name from across a crowded room, you can notice it before you consciously decide to even listen. If something moves unexpectedly in your peripheral vision, your attention can orient towards it almost immediately. That sensitivity is useful, but a notification from your phone is perceived the exact same way by your brain, which means that before you've even decided whether the information actually deserves your attention, Some portion of your attention has already been recruited to deal with it. And this isn't just theoretical. A twenty fifteen study on distraction and attention related to task performance with interruptions tested this directly. The researchers gave participants an attention demanding task and then sent phone notifications to some of them while they performed that task. The participants never touched their phones, never read their messages, never responded in any way, but their performance on the task measurably declined. They made more errors and responded more slowly, even though they successfully resisted every notification. The exact size of that effect varies across studies and it depends on the individual, the task, and the kind of interruption. The broader finding has been replicated in different forms, and the implication is consistent. Not responding to a notification does not make the notification cognitively indivisible. To experience this yourself, think about what's actually like to be in the middle of a demanding task. Suppose you're writing something very complicated. You've got the argument in your head, you know where the paragraph is going, and you're holding several pieces of information together while you're trying to turn them into a coherent sentence. Then your phone buzzes. You don't touch it. Maybe you even feel slightly pleased with yourself because you resisted it. But for a fraction of a second, part of the cognitive process that was holding your argument together in your head now has to deal with something else entirely. Now, you probably continue working. But now an internal dialogue is occurring. What was that? Was it the email I was waiting for? Was it a text? Is there something I need to know immediately? Sometimes that thought becomes completely conscious, and other times it barely registers to us. But either way, when you return fully to your work, there can be a small reconstruction process that occurs. You reread the sentence, you recover the thought, you remember the connection you were trying to make in the first place. And none of that feels especially difficult. Which is one of the reasons we underestimate this problem. One interruption is probably not going to ruin your ability to think. But attention can be degraded in much smaller increments than we usually imagine. A few seconds here, a lost train of thought broken there, or a sentence or paragraph you have to reread in order to get reoriented with where you were. And when these small interruptions become a consistent part of the background of every day, the cost is not only the time spent looking at the phone. It's also the repeated requirement to disengage, to evaluate whatever just interrupted you, to suppress the impulse to respond, and then attempt to reconstruct a task you were already doing. And when you consider it in that context, there's something slightly strange about the way most of us configure our devices. We allow wildly different kinds of information to compete for exactly the same attentional channel. A message from your child's school can produce a vibration on your phone and So can a sale at a clothing store. An important work email can produce a banner that pops up, but so can a social media app telling you that somebody liked something you posted yesterday. Your bank can alert you to suspicious activity, and 10 minutes later, another app can use essentially the same mechanism because it would like you to come back and look at some content. From the perspective of your attention, all of those things arrive with a similar instruction to your brain. Stop what you're doing for a moment. Something else would like to be considered here. And of course, some of those interruptions should absolutely be allowed. If my daughter's school needs to reach me or there's an emergency at my home, I want that interruption. If I'm waiting for an important call, then being reachable is much more valuable than protecting an uninterrupted hour of my work. So the argument here is not that notifications are inherently bad, or that the ideal phone is one that never alerts you to anything. A more useful distinction is between information that deserves immediate access to your attention. And information that merely wants it. Those are not the same thing, and yet by default, we often treat them like they are. And there's at least some evidence to suggest that redesigning this matters. A 2019 randomized field experiment by Fitz and colleagues took over 200 smartphone users and had some of them receive their notifications in three scheduled batches per day instead of the usual constant stream. The batching group reported less stress. Better attentiveness and a greater sense of control over their devices than those who receive them consistently. But here's the part that I find most interesting. The group that turned off notifications entirely didn't do any better. They actually reported more anxiety than the other two groups, which suggests that the goal isn't to eliminate notifications entirely, but to be much more deliberate about which ones get through and when. shows up in an even larger way when we try to measure the problem. Because the main number we often use is screen time. Our phones tell us exactly how much time we've spent using what apps, and somehow that single number is supposed to tell us whether our relationship with technology is healthy. But three hours of phone use can mean almost anything. Imagine two people who both spend three hours on their phones over the course of a day. One spends part of that time talking with family, navigating somewhere unfamiliar with the maps app, Reading an article, responding to messages, listening to a podcast, and taking care of things that genuinely needed to be done. The other opens the phone dozens of times with no particular intention, checks a feed, moves to another app, watches a few short videos, checks email again, goes back to that feed, and repeats that pattern multiple times throughout the day. The clock might record roughly the same amount of screen time for both of those people, but Those are not the same behaviors, and they're certainly not the same attentional experience. The distinction I think matters much more is purposeful use of technology versus automatic use. Purposeful use begins with an intention. You pick up your device because there's something you want it to help you do. Get directions, make a call, read a specific article, or even 20 minutes of entertainment that you deliberately chose. The phone is doing what tools are supposed to do. It's helping you carry out an intention you already had. Automatic use occurs very differently. The device gets involved before there's even a clear intention at all. You reach for it because there was a break in conversation, or the elevator doors haven't opened, or you're finished one task and haven't decided what to do next. And sometimes you can't even say what you were looking for until after you find it. That's a very different relationship with the device. The research increasingly supports this kind of distinction too. In a 2020 review by K et al., the research team examined how screen time is actually studied and found what they called conceptual and methodological mayhem. The findings across studies were mixed. The definitions of screen time were inconsistent, and most of the research relied heavily on self report data with very little accounting for what people were actually doing during those hours or why. Their conclusion wasn't that screen time is irrelevant. But that treating it as single meaningful variable obscures far more than it reveals. And when researchers have attempted to look more carefully at what people are actually doing on their phones, the picture gets even more interesting. A 2018 study by Lukov and colleagues analyzed over 86,000 individual app use sessions. And they combined usage logs with experience sampling and interviews of the actual study participants. What they found was that habitual use of technology The kind where you open the phone to pass time with no particular goal in mind, was consistently associated with lower perceived meaningfulness and a greater sense of lost autonomy. But purposeful use, where someone picked up the device with a clear intention, looked very different. The type of use mattered far more than how the device was used, which makes intuitive sense. If I told you somebody spent two hours using paper, you'd have no idea whether that was good or bad. Were they reading a book or shredding old documents? The amount of time tells you almost nothing because paper use is not a meaningful behavioral category. And yet screen use often gets treated as though it is. A much more interesting question is not how many minutes were spent on the device, but whether those minutes represented an intention you were carrying out or an intention that got derailed. Suppose you sit down at night and intentionally watch 45 minutes of YouTube because there's a documentary that you've really wanted to see. Now compare that with opening YouTube to watch one video and emerging 45 minutes later after watching seven things you never intended to see. Same platform, same amount of time, but a completely different experience altogether. In the first case, the technology served the intention, but in the second, the intention was gradually replaced by whatever the system presented to the user next. And this is where the process we've been discussing starts to come together. Low friction makes a behavior. Any behavior, easy to begin. Missing cues to stop make it easy to continue. Notifications repeatedly create new entry points. Personalized feeds continually offer another possible direction. None of those things has to overpower you. They simply make it easier for your attention to move without requiring a very deliberate choice each time it moves. And that's why I'm less interested in whether somebody spends two hours or four hours on a phone than I am in how. Often they experience that moment we talked about earlier when they suddenly realize they are somewhere they never meant to be. Because that's a loss of intentionality. And intentionality is really the thread running through this entire discussion. The problem isn't that your phone is irresistible or uninteresting. We want useful tools to be interesting. And the problem is not that entertainment exists either. It's not even that sometimes you waste time because Human beings have been wasting time for considerably longer than smartphones have existed. The problem centers on the question of whether you are making enough of the decisions about where your attention goes. And that question matters more than the raw number of hours spent using a device because attention determines what you're able to do with the time you already have. You can technically have an uninterrupted hour available to work, but if that hour contains 30 small shifts of attention, what you accomplish in that hour if anything, would be error prone and of poor quality, likely requiring you to invest even more time trying to fix it. So instead of asking, How many hours was I on my phone? a better set of questions might be, what did I actually use it for? How much of that was intentional? How often did I pick it up without knowing why? And when I finished, did I feel as though I had done what I intended to do? Those questions tell you much more than a weekly screen time report ever could, and If we've correctly identified this problem, then the response is not to escape the technology. It's to change the conditions under which you use it. Which means the next question we need to answer here is where to begin. So if the goal is to change the conditions rather than just trying harder, the question then becomes where to start. And I think there's a useful order here. The first thing I'd look at is who or what gets permission to interrupt you. Go through the notifications on your lock screen and ask a very simple question. Does this information actually need immediate access to me? For some things, the answer is going to be an obvious yes. Calls from certain people, messages from family, security alerts, calendar reminders, or maybe even a handful of work related notifications, depending on what kind of work you do. But a lot of what reaches us immediately is not even remotely urgent. It's simply delivered urgently because we've allowed it to. That's an important distinction. News can wait until you decide to read the news. Social media can wait until you decide to open social media. And shopping apps can almost certainly wait, as can almost all email. A red badge telling you that twelve things have happened since you last looked is not the same thing as twelve things requiring your attention now. So the first intervention I would recommend is not becoming better at ignoring notifications. It's Dramatically reducing how many things are allowed to create them. Next, I would look at friction. Remember the principle from earlier. When a behavior becomes nearly effortless, even a very small impulse can be enough to trigger it. So if there's an app you find yourself opening automatically, you don't necessarily need to delete it, but you might need to make the behavior slightly less automatic. Take it off the home screen, log out, remove your saved password, use the browser version instead of the app itself. Put the app on a tablet or a computer rather than carrying it in your pocket to make accessing it even more challenging for you. Now, none of these steps are going to make the behavior impossible. The point here is to establish a moment in which your attention has a chance to catch up with your hands. If opening something requires three deliberate actions instead of one unconscious tap, those few seconds are sometimes enough for you to realize. I didn't actually mean to do this. The third thing I would change is the way activities end. If you know that infinite feeds and autoplay remove cues to stop an activity, then put them in place wherever you can. Turn autoplay off or use an actual timer if you want to spend 20 minutes on something. Decide before opening a feed what the session is actually for. The goal is not to eliminate entertainment altogether, it's to restore a point at which continuing becomes. a choice. And then there's one intervention that is almost embarrassingly simple, but I think it may be one of the most useful of all. Know why you're picking up the phone before you unlock it. That doesn't mean you need to announce your attention out loud every time your phone rings, but it does mean intentionally noticing the difference between I'm checking the address for this meeting and my hand is already reaching for this thing and I've have no idea why. Those moments of automatic use can provide valuable information for us. You don't need to feel guilty about them, but you do need to notice them. Because once you start noticing what tends to trigger them, the patterns tell you much more than your total screen time ever could. And finally, I'd try to protect some periods of the day in which the phone isn't part of the process at all. If you're doing deep work, your phone should be in another room. If you're having dinner with someone, your phone should probably be out of sight. If your goal is to sleep, Your charging location should ideally be somewhere you can't reach from your bed. The specific rule matters less than the principle. There should be parts of your life in which the decision about what deserves your attention has already been made by you with intention. And I'd encourage you to notice what has changed if you work through even a few of these suggestions. You're not trying to become a person who's immune to distraction. You're simply trying to make fewer demands on your own self control and By reducing the number of moments in which self-control is required. That is what good environmental design does. It doesn't eliminate choice, it makes the choice you actually care about easier to keep. And that brings us to the reason why any of this matters beyond the phone itself, because this is ultimately not an episode about managing your smartphone. It's an episode about attention. And attention has almost everything to do with what we mean when we talk about mastery. So that brings us back to the reason I wanted to talk about all of this in the first place. Phone is just where the problem becomes unusually easy to see. But the real subject of this discussion has always been about whether or not you get to decide where your attention goes and keep it there long enough to do something worthwhile with it. And when you consider learning performance or mastery in those terms, attention stops looking like a productivity hack and starts looking like one of the core conditions the rest of the process depends on. If you're trying to learn something difficult, for example, exposure isn't enough. You have to remain engaged with the material long enough to work through what you don't understand. Retrieve what you've learned, make connections, correct mistakes, and come back to it again repeatedly. If you're practicing a skill, you need enough sustained attention to notice the difference between what you intended to do and what you actually did. If you're attempting to solve a difficult problem, you usually have to stay with it after the obvious answers have already occurred to you. None of those processes work particularly well when attention is being repeatedly reset or worse yet, hijacked. And I want to distinguish that from saying you need for perfect concentration for hours at a time, because that's not realistic nor is it necessary. Human attention shifts sometimes for very predictable reasons. We all get tired, our minds wander, and sometimes just taking a break is exactly what improves the work. The issue isn't that attention ever moves. The issue is whether you're the one deciding when it moves. That's the connection that I think carries the most weight. Earlier in the episode, we talked about the difference between purposeful phone use and automatic phone use. That same distinction can be applied much more broadly because there's a big difference between choosing to stop working because you need a break and finding yourself somewhere else before you ever decided to stop. There's a difference between intentionally checking a message and discovering that. Just checking the message became 20 minutes of a completely unrelated activity. There's also a difference between deciding to change tasks and having a notification make that decision for you. From the outside, all of those situations may look similar. You stopped doing one thing and you started doing another, but internally they're all very different because one preserves agency over attention and the other gradually gives some of that agency away. And that's important because the pursuit of mastery through difficult work always contains moments when leaving becomes a really attractive option. Most of us will eventually reach a point where whatever we are pursuing stops providing us with quick evidence that we're making progress, and even the most dedicated of people can struggle to maintain their effort level. Those are precisely the moments when sustained attention becomes extremely useful. Not because there's something virtuous about suffering through boredom, but Because a lot of learning and improvement happens after the point where the activity stops being immediately rewarding. If an easier alternative is always one movement away, then every moment of difficulty comes with an exit ramp. That changes the environment in which mastery is supposed to develop. And I think this is why the willpower framing we started with is ultimately too narrow. If I'm trying to write something difficult, I don't gain anything by keeping six apps open, leaving every notification active. Placing the phone right next to my keyboard and then proving that I can ignore all of it. The work doesn't become better because I made concentration harder. The better question is not how much distraction can I successfully resist. It's really what conditions make the kind of attention this work requires more likely. The point isn't to use technology less just for the sake of using it less. The point here is to make sure the technology remains subordinate to the thing you intended to do with it. Because once that relationship reverses, something subtle starts to happen. You can still be busy all day, answer messages, read things, watch things, respond to things, and move constantly from one small demand to another, and at the end of the day, you probably feel mentally exhausted. But exhaustion alone does not mean that you were productive or the quality of your work was high. In other words, you can spend a tremendous amount of effort. and attention without ever sustaining it. And mastery requires sustained attention often enough for difficult things to develop. That might mean understanding an idea well enough to explain it without having the book in front of you. It might mean practicing a movement until you can detect an error that you couldn't before. Or maybe it means staying with a problem long enough to discover that your first interpretation of it was wrong, or giving another person Enough undivided attention to actually understand what they're saying. All of those things take time, but more specifically, they take time during which your attention remains available to the thing that you decided mattered. So the question I'd leave you with is not how many hours appeared on your screen time dashboard today. It's this. When you picked up that device, whether it was a phone, a tablet, or your laptop, were you using it to carry out an intentional act, or were you allowing it to give you one? If you can answer that question honestly, you may find you don't need a dramatic reset. You might simply need fewer things competing for the right to decide what to do next. And if you can create that space, then attention becomes available again for the things that actually require it. Learning difficult things, doing work that matters to you, or simply being present for someone when they are sitting right in front of you. Mastery doesn't require your attention every minute of every day, but whatever you hope to master does need to receive enough of it to With consistency for the work to accumulate. And increasingly, in today's digitally interconnected world, that's something we all need to be intentional about. I want to thank you for listening to this episode of the Mastery Project Podcast. And if you found this information helpful or interesting, please share it with a colleague. As always, I will see you in the next episode.