5 attention-management techniques that transform the way you work

Attention is one of an organisation’s most valuable resources. Almost nothing of consequence happens without it. Yet most organisations don’t manage attention – or even think of it as a resource to be managed – with anything like the discipline they apply to money, people, or time. And it shows, writes Adam Williams.

Research from Atlassian found 64 per cent of knowledge workers say their team is constantly being pulled in too many directions, while 65 per cent say responding quickly to messages is more important than making progress on their top priorities. Atlassian estimates ineffective collaboration costs Fortune 500 companies 25 billion working hours every year.

This isn’t simply a productivity problem. It’s an attention-allocation problem. Management Professor William Ocasio has spent decades studying what he calls the “attention-based view of the firm”: the idea that what organisations ultimately do is shaped by how they channel and distribute the attention of their decision-makers.

Which raises an important question: if attention helps determine what an organisation does, why don’t we manage it accordingly? The cost of getting that allocation wrong is something I call the attention tax – the invisible and sometimes crippling cost of attention going somewhere other than where it would be better directed.

Working longer or harder isn’t the answer. Directing attention better is. And that’s where HR leaders can play an important role. Instead of looking only at workload, start looking at attention load – how many competing objectives, systems, meetings, communications and initiatives are your people expected to pay attention to at once? More importantly, how many of them deserve that attention? Here are five ways to reduce the load and direct more attention towards what matters most.

1. Remove to improve

Organisations are remarkably good at adding things. New priorities. New meetings. New initiatives. New reports. New communication channels. The problem is that every addition makes another demand on our finite human attention. Remove To Improve makes subtraction a management discipline. Before adding something, ask what can be removed, reduced, automated, delegated or deprioritised. Which meetings no longer justify the attention they consume? Which reports are produced because they’ve always been produced? Which processes have outlived the problem they were created to solve? Sometimes the fastest way to give something important more attention is to stop giving attention to something less important.

2. Remember Parkinson

In 1955, British historian C. Northcote Parkinson introduced Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time available. Give someone a week for something that could be done in a day, and they may research more, discuss more, refine more and involve more people. The result is an over-investment of time and attention – an under-recognised form of attention tax. Parkinson also gave us the Law of Triviality, known as bike-shedding or inverse prioritisation. His fictional committee spends little time discussing a complex nuclear reactor but becomes absorbed in debating a bicycle shed because it’s easier to understand and discuss. Together, the two laws expose a common organisational problem: we can overinvest attention because time is available, and misallocate it because easier things attract us. To counter both, ask: How much attention does this deserve? What deserves attention ahead of it? How much time does it really require? Don’t allocate attention according to time available or ease. Allocate it according to value.

3. Close your open windows

Professor Sophie Leroy discovered that when people switch between tasks, part of their attention can remain on the previous task – particularly when the previous task was left unfinished – impairing their performance on what comes next. This is called attention residue. The remedy is to minimise the number of “open windows” you have at any one time, minimise unnecessary task-switching, and create closure where you can. Finish before starting something else. Cluster meetings rather than scattering them throughout the day. Protect uninterrupted periods for cognitively demanding work. And when you can’t finish something, create a clear plan for where and how you’ll resume it – approach subsequent attention-residue research found can help people disengage.

4. Put performance problems through the GATE

The GATE Matrix provides a simple diagnostic for why performance may not reach expected or desired levels. For any important piece of work, ask:

• Goal: Is the goal or outcome clear?
• Attention: Is it receiving sufficient attention?
• Time: Has enough time been allocated to it?
• Effort: Is sufficient energy and effort being applied?

Think of each as a gate. If one is closed, performance is constrained. For example, you can spend three hours on something without making meaningful progress because your attention is elsewhere. You can be intensely focused but have insufficient time. You can have time and attention but be working towards an unclear goal. So, when something important isn’t moving, don’t automatically assume you need to work harder. Find the closed gate.

5. Reduce attentional resistance

Why do we sometimes avoid the work we know matters most? I’ve named one explanation “attentional resistance”: the greater the perceived effort, difficulty or discomfort, the greater the resistance we’re likely to experience to giving it our attention. That marketing plan is cognitively demanding, so you check email first. The difficult conversation is uncomfortable, so you tackle some admin. Writing the strategy requires sustained thought, but a coffee run gains priority. We often call this procrastination. In this case, our attention is being drawn towards the path of lower resistance. Leaders should learn to recognise attentional resistance and when “being productive” is actually avoidance in disguise. Because the biggest threat to performance isn’t always an inability to focus. Sometimes we focus extremely well – just on something easier.

Every day, organisations make thousands of decisions about attention. Individually, those decisions can seem insignificant. Collectively, they determine performance, profits, engagement and culture. Attention is more than a productivity issue. It’s a leadership issue. Leaders are architects of attention. And attention management isn’t simply about eliminating distraction. It’s about allocating attention in proportion to value. Because ultimately, what your organisation pays attention to will determine what it becomes.

Adam Williams is The Attention Architect and author of Mega Focus: Take Back Control. Join the Attention Revolution.

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