Issue 10
The internet is designed to steal your attention. Discover how to build internal boundaries, manage your processing capacity, and protect your most valuable asset—your focus—as a modern leader.
By Martin Drohmann
These are not my words, but the words of Dan Kennedy. But I completely agree with them. Our bodies are equipped with billions of nerves, and exposing them to the internet can be dangerous to the focussed mind.
Recently, I experienced this firsthand: I opened YouTube in the morning to listen to a guided meditation. Instead of finding my center, I ended up clicking on a YouTube Short. Still waking up, I could kind of listen to these nerves firing in my brain, that the shorts title triggered. But I was not able to maintain the boundary I had set for myself, until I fully woke up. It shows me that boundaries take work, and reinforcement.
The algorithms powering platforms such as Youtube have become terrifyingly good at predicting what we will click on. They are ruthlessly optimized for maximum attention, which ultimately serves the platform’s bottom line. Occasionally, their suggestions might randomly align with what we actually want to pay attention to. But watching how Brad Bit reacts when prompted if he regrets his divorce from Jennifer Aniston, does not fall in this bucket. It just has lots of triggers in our brains: actors are connected to movies and our own experiences watching them, relationships and marriage especially, is something all of us have trouble with. I don’t want these synapses to fire early in the morning, coffee is a much healthier way to wake up.
Consider this: large tech companies often ensure their own employees’ internal objectives target an 80% success rate to avoid that their employees are not getting too “addicted” to checking of boxes, but still take time to prioritize what is most important. I don’t think, they are not so kind to their users. They don’t mind if we get endlessly addicted to a video stream.
While it is essential to build the internal capacity to resist these urges, I find it too tiring too rely on sheer willpower. It is also a waste of energy. I’ve found it helpful to modify my environment instead. I use browser plugins, like News Feed Eradicator, to strip away the elements specifically designed to hijack my attention. It’s a much different experience, and I miss nothing.
What the internet teaches us: Capacity matters. Coffee helps probably sometimes, or other druges, but in the end, every leaders should be in charge about what information they consume, how much time they protect to process it.
But this is not an easy task anymore.
Getting information used to be the hard part. Today, the simple part is setting up a feedback channel for all team members or subscribing to every relevant industry newsletter. Information is infinite.
The real challenge is capacity management. As a leader, you have to ask yourself:
Assess your personal capacity to process information and take action on it?
With care,
Martin