By Guest Author Stefania Lucchetti
On the 4th of August at the Techonomy Conference in Lake Tahoe, CA, Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated that “Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003." This humongous number is mainly due to user-generated content (pictures, messages, tweets etc.).
The new technologies allow not only fast production but especially instant distribution of information: this leaves us with a permanent processing deficit for most of us, in the digital age, who handle nothing else but information for a living. We create it, process it and consume it, and feel overwhelmed most of the time.
You might think that time is your scarcest resource in the digital age. And yet, your scarcest resource is not time: it is actually attention.
You may observe that, as we are inundated with information and products, attention - rather than money - becomes the scarcest resource and where we choose to allocate this attention will increasingly determine what creates economic value. Human attention is a scarce commodity: if you look at your daily life, you will probably see that most of the decisions you make every day - and increasingly so - concern where your attention should go. It is an issue every time you receive an email, a chat, a Facebook message, a newsletter, perform a search on Google, select a form of entertainment, etc. (and you may often do all of these at the same time). You notice that the decisions you make are increasingly more concerned with where to place your attention than, for example, where to place your money.
The catchy side of this is that the most popular use of digital interaction means: email and digital chats have become more to do with getting attention (or making your presence “known” to the addressee of the conversation) than with transmitting valuable and relevant information.
This results in a constant exchange of “attention prompts” from different sources at the same time. The danger of this is that our brain is not yet trained to an appropriate response to these different simultaneous attention prompts. As I discuss in The Principle of Relevance, most people still have an automatic response instinct based on the assumption that if someone is sending you a certain message, it is relevant enough to be worth your attention.
This instinct is a fundamental building block of human social relationships. However, it doesn’t serve us in our current complex world of multileveled digital interactions, in which a number of different messages are sent through to us at the same time by different people and a communication itself will most of the times manifest nothing else but the intent to communicate and catch your attention, while this does not mean that the actual content of the communication is relevant, per se, for the mere fact that it was communicated to you.
The digital world requires a continuous assessment of whether the messages received are worth processing, and whether the message is worth your attention. This is because the information age creates a situation similar to being in a room where one hundred people are talking to you at once and only two of them have the information you need: you need to learn how to filter out quickly those different inputs, to focus in on the one face addressing you with the information you need or to which you want to dedicate attention—that which is relevant for you.
How do you do this?
In The Principle of Relevance, five elements are discussed:
- clarity of purpose
- situational awareness
- pattern discernment
- attention
- self-knowledge and self-mastery
Self-knowledge and self-mastery is, of all these steps, the most important.
You have to become aware of your information processing patterns and make a conscious choice to take control of the information you process and respond to rather than living in a reactive manner, just like you do with your diet, just like you do when you select a movie to see at the cinema.
By knowing yourself first (how do you process information? how long is your attention span? when are you most receptive? how fast do you process data? how much can your memory hold? what is most likely to distract you?) you learn to work within your strengths, limitations, and incongruities. You build internal power in your attention, focus, and decision making.
It is very simple, although not always easy, to do; as it requires a special tool that you cannot buy in any Apple store but only find within yourself: a high degree of commitment and intention.
Stefania Lucchetti (http://www.stefanialucchetti.com/) is an internationally renowned expert on leadership and productivity. Her book The Principle of Relevance has been defined “the message of the times.”
Stefania Lucchetti: The Principle of Relevance