Attention Fragmentation
Is it slowing you down?
What we chose to pay attention to is probably the most important choice we can make.
There are so many things vying for our attention, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
“Your attention is one of the most valuable things you possess, which is why everyone wants to steal it from you.” - Austin Kleon, Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad
With how valuable our attention is, it seems pretty obvious that we should be cautious about who and what we give it to.
I’ve noticed a growing trend of what I like to call attention fragmentation. This behavior is often caused by our desire to avoid boredom or challenge. It’s much easier to pull out a cell phone and open up twitter than it is to think through and solve the problems we are currently facing.
As we repeatedly default to easy distractions, our attention ends up fragmented like a computer hard drive. Fragmented hard drives make accessing important data much slower. This fragmentation is caused because the hard drive crams files in-between other files when storing them.
“Fragmentation occurs when the file system cannot or will not allocate enough contiguous space to store a complete file as a unit but instead puts part of it in gaps between existing files” - Wikipedia, Defragmentation
Just like computers, we often cram the attention we spend on important things in-between a myriad of other distractions. This slows our ability to think and create, just like a fragmented hard drive.
It’s okay to check your Twitter, watch a YouTube video, or write a Facebook post about how you are feeling. However, these activities should not be sprinkled through your focused work time.
When the time comes to work on your game, do it. Give your attention fully to that task. When the time comes to visit with your partner, or spend time with your children, do it. Give your attention to them. Live in the moment and embrace it. If you set aside some time for social media, do it. Enjoy it. But don’t fragment it throughout the day.
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven” - Ecclesiastes 3:1
Thanks for reading,
Ben
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Nowadays we live in a world where literally everything is built to grab our attention, distract us. The very technology used to allow this message to get to you is one of them.
That's why taking the time to steer away from everything is paramount to equip ourselves with the tools to avoid becoming slaves of these distraction vacuums.
Couldn't agree more on your post. Well written.
I'm pretty good at avoiding social media, but one thing that gets me is Discord (the godot discord in particular). Sometimes I might hop on to ask a quick question, or to get some inspiration, and end up losing 2 hours to answering people's questions and trying to solve their problems. It *feels* sorta almost enough like gamedev to not immediately set off the "hey you're distracted!" alarm bells, it's rewarding to help new game devs, and yet if I were to count up the hours wasted being sucked into this activity when I was planning to develop my own stuff, it would easily be in the dozens of hours.