Attention Hijacking (and how not to be a dry leaf drifting in the wind)

Attention Hijacking is a common modern phenomenon that happens when we aim to focus our attention on one thing but end up having it hijacked by other, possibly meaningless things.

As an example, I intermittently check my phone — usually to look at a specific app or to check my email. Today I checked my phone for email and saw an email from “Google Photos”* saying “Here’s what you missed from Google Photos…”. I was going to click on it and then decided not to. The email probably has a cute collage or an animated story of the pictures I took of my daughter a couple of days ago. Had I simply clicked on it, my consciousness would have been sucked into a vortex of cute pictures of my daughter — which I would have clicked on for a few minutes and enjoyed, only to realize that not only have I lost 10 minutes (which I can never get back) but also my stream of consciousness that may have been focused on another task.

There is also another, somewhat philosophical, argument against letting such factors hijack our stream of consciousness. It leaves us at the mercy of third party services or factors that aren’t really important in our lives. They in no way help us reach our key goals. In fact, they tear us away from them. 

• The time that is lost in checking meaningless updates, is never gonna come back
• The quality of your work would suffer in a possibly irreparable way by the break in your flow
• Finally, such attention hijacking takes away the sense of control from us leaving us to be like a leaf drifting in the drain of notifications

To prevent this, I have started a discipline of not checking notifications that seem irrelevant. When I get tempted I ask myself the question whether I really want to spend 2 minutes of my life (2 minutes that I will never ever get back) on checking Facebook or Instagram or a constantly updating News Page on iOS or Product updates from random products over email.

Or I ask myself whether this is really the best use of my time. 

And each time that I prevent my attention from being hijacked, I’m left with a few extra minutes and a bit of satisfaction.

*[I have nothing against Google Photos and think they provide an excellent service — but just using them as an example. The same phenomenon happens with other services such as Facebook or Instagram as well]