Attention Management

Attention represents also an important element for businesses in their interaction with the external world. Organizations need to manage effectively their communication to “get the attention” of their customers and of their potential business partners, since this visibility is increasingly difficult to obtain in a world flooded with information. Managing this communication represents a domain that is however well known and occupied by the media and advertising industry, even if it is facing major transformation (following the advent of the Internet).

Although we will not address here the communication dimension of attention in management, this dimension has an important impact on knowledge workers, who are both more solicited (and therefore must establish effective filtering strategies), and must ensure that their messages obtain the proper level of attention from receivers without overwhelming them.

First, let’s understand attention. The human brain is wired to explore and master challenges, and to do that, it has the capacity for what is called deep work – sustained, uninterrupted time when you and your thoughts are totally immersed in the plans and work that go into tackling, resolving, or completing a challenge productively.

Sustained Attention 

Sustained Attention is the ability to keep your focus on a single task or activity for an extended period. It's like shining a powerful spotlight on one thing, allowing you to go deep into it without being easily distracted. Think about reading a book. Sustained Attention is what lets you immerse yourself in it and make progress. This type of Attention is vital for tasks that require thorough thinking and concentration.  

When you can maintain Sustained Attention, you're able to complete tasks more efficiently and produce higher-quality work. However, it can be challenging in a world full of digital distractions and constant notifications. Practising sustained Attention involves creating an environment that minimises interruptions. You also need to set aside dedicated time blocks for focused work. 

Selective Attention  

Selective Attention is like having a mental filter that allows you to concentrate on one thing while ignoring everything else. For example, you are in a busy party where many conversations are happening around you, yet you can focus on just one person's voice. This ability is crucial for staying on track and avoiding sensory overload. It enables you to prioritise what deserves your mental energy and ignore irrelevant ones. 

In a world full of information, Selective Attention allows you to choose where to direct your focus. This skill is particularly valuable when you need to complete tasks that demand your undivided attention. By practising Selective Attention, you can increase your efficiency, reduce stress, and make better decisions. It is important to be aware of how you allocate your Selective Attention. 

Divided Attention 

Divided Attention involves attempting to handle multiple tasks or stimuli simultaneously. It's similar to juggling several balls at once, requiring you to allocate a portion of your cognitive resources to each task. While it might seem like a superpower, it's essential to recognise its limitations. Dividing your attention too thinly can result in reduced performance for all tasks involved. 

In some situations, Divided Attention can be useful, such as when driving while listening to music. However, tasks that require significant effort, like problem-solving or learning, usually suffer from Divided Attention. Engaging in multiple tasks at once often leads to mistakes, slower completion times, and increased mental fatigue. To effectively manage divided attention, consider the complexity of tasks and prioritise those that truly require multiple focus. 

Alternating Attention 

Alternating Attention is the ability to shift your focus quickly between different tasks or activities. It's like smoothly switching gears in your mind, allowing you to adapt to changing demands. For instance, you might be playing a video game and then instantly shift your attention to respond to a question from your parent. This skill is essential when tasks require frequent context switching or when you need to balance different responsibilities. 

While Alternating Attention can enhance flexibility, it's important to manage it wisely. Constantly shifting your focus can disrupt your workflow and decrease overall efficiency. Finding a balance between sustained focus and effective switching is key. With Alternating Attention, you become better equipped to handle multitasking. 

The advent of the knowledge-based economy has radically transformed the nature of work and business in organizations. Employees, who once used to fulfil relatively routine tasks in stable environments, have now transformed into autonomous knowledge workers who are engaged into rich, diverse, changing, and creative activities in which information processing and participation in virtual community environments play a central role.

Coaching and Learning organisations (Argyris & Schon, 1978; Dodgson, 1993) operate in a continuously changing world and focus on supplying a large diversity of services highly customized to the needs of a multitude of customers. These organisations must rapidly adapt to open, complex, and ever changing environments involving the interaction with a variety of actors and stakeholders. Success factors for these organizations include their capability to listen to their customers, to constantly innovate (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995), and to compete with others often by reinventing themselves (Senge, 1994).

For the employees, these new conditions have translated in the acceleration of time, the multiplication of projects in which they are involved, and the increased number of collaborations often based on digital interactions. They have to process a considerably larger amount of information and solicitations than in the past (Heylighen, 2004), originating from a multitude of sources and tools. They also must interact with a variety of people, with different functions, cultural backgrounds (Nisbett, 2003), and from different organisations.

These interactions increasingly include less formal forms of communication, for which the filtering strategies are more fuzzily defined indicates that social networks, a filtering mechanisms based on the social process, have become a key source of labour and information)

This higher level of attention is an incredible human asset that results in achievement, innovation, breakthroughs, competitive advantages, efficiencies, advances, and solutions of all kinds.

Attention management has a bigger impact on your performance, career, and job satisfaction than anything else.  This is because it focuses on what matters most. Learning how to manage attention successfully by setting aside two high-energy hours each day to work intensively on the most important project, keeping distractions at bay during that time. 

As ‘People’s Attention’ represents one of the most precious intangible assets of modern organizations. In this model describes how to better support attentional processes. The model relies on four different levels of attention support: (1) a perception level, aiming at optimising the observation and the selection of information; (2) a deliberative level, aiming at supporting people's deliberate choices of attention allocation and decision making; (3) an operational level, aiming at making the execution of tasks more effective in terms of allocation of cognitive resources; and (4) a meta-cognition level, aiming at helping users in reflecting about their attentional practices and possibly learning more effective ones

Supporting attention

Studies in cognitive psychology have clearly established that attention allocation depends both on perceptual and deliberative processes. At the perceptual level, what we perceive (e.g. see, hear, feel) impacts on what we pay attention to.

At the deliberative level our goals, motivations, and intentions, also play a role in the determination of our attention focus. Therefore, a natural way to study the support of attention consists in the exploration of mechanisms facilitating the perception of the environment, and the interpretation and the reasoning on this information.

At a different level of observation, it is clear that actions require a varying degree of cognitive effort depending on the form and the nature of the task being accomplished. For instance, some activities may require a high level of concentration to get focussed, a higher degree of vigilance, the switching between many sub-tasks, or be subject to a significant number of interruptions.

Therefore at the operational level the provision of mechanisms allowing the users to be more effective in term of the cognitive effort allocated to fulfil an objective represents another means of supporting attention.

Finally, we are able, as we are doing here, to reflect about our own strategies for allocating attention, and to learn more effective attention allocation strategies. Therefore, mechanisms supporting the meta-cognitive level elaboration and evaluation of strategies for attention allocation can be proposed as another means of supporting a person’s attention.

Supporting attention at the perceptual level

Supporting perception means increasing both the ability to notice relevant information and to discard the irrelevant. We recognise at least four different manners in which perception may be enhanced: (1) facilitating the selection of relevant information (2) facilitating information comprehension, (3) supporting group perception, and (4) presenting interruptions at the correct level of prominence.

These four issues (information selection, information comprehension, group perception, and presentation prominence) are strongly related. Access to information, in fact, has become problematic not only because of the sheered quantity of information available, but also, and especially, because individuals have very little tools and facilities enabling them to easily perceive what the content of a resource may be, how, when, and by whom the resource was created, edited, and accessed.

Not only more resources are available but also more people may be related to each resource. Purposely designed digital tools may however support individuals in their perception of resources.

Presenting interruptions at the correct level of prominence

This may significantly reduce load at the perceptual level. Whilst in co-located communication we have developed a vast range of interruption strategies that vary in their level of prominence (e.g. standing next to a person waiting for the previous conversation or activity to be finished, making signs to signal the intention to communicate, intruding into one's conversation or activity in a more or less polite or urgent manner), the choice of the strategy is not only based on the knowledge of the message we want to communicate but also on some knowledge of the activity of the person we want to interrupt. In the case of device-mediated communication, knowledge workers are once again lacking half of the picture.

This makes the choice of the appropriate interruption prominence much more difficult to evaluate. Notification can take a variety of forms, such as the sending of an email or of an instant message, the posting of a message in a chat box, the displaying of an item in the home page of a portal, the display of a blinking icon, or the intervention of an artificial character.

The most appropriate format depends on a variety of factors, including the current state of the receiver (e.g. he/she is busy and should not be disturbed, or he/she is consulting the mailbox), the amount and complexity of information that needs to be communicated, the urgency of the communication, and the relevance of the information being communicated to the receiver.

Whilst it has been shown that supplying information about pending tasks improves people's ability to manage interruption (C. Y. Ho, Nikolic, Waters, & Sarter, 2004), the notification modality may impact on the user activity at various levels: it may go completely unnoticed, it may smoothly integrate with the user’s current task, or it may capture the user’s attention and cause a temporary or durable focus switch.

McCrickard and his colleagues (McCrickard & Chewar, 2003) proposed to measure the effects of visual notification with respect to four parameters: (1) users’ interruption caused by the reallocation of attention from a primary task to a notification, (2) users’ reaction to a specific secondary information cue while performing a primary task, (3) users’ comprehension of information presented in secondary displays over a period of time, and (4) user satisfaction.

They provided recommendations indicating, for example, that small sized in place animation can be defined as best suited for goals of minimal attention reallocation (low interruption), immediate response (high reaction) and small knowledge gain (low comprehension). Bartram, Ware, and Calvert (2003) proposed the use of moticons (icons with motions) as an effective visual technique for information rich displays that minimise distraction. Finally, Arroyo and Selker (2003) studied the effects of using different modalities for interruption in ambient displays concentrating on the effects of heat and light channels.

Supporting attention at the deliberative level

Whilst at the perceptual level attention is influenced by external stimuli, at the deliberative level attention is influenced by one's goals, motivations, and intentions; further, these two processes (perceptive and deliberative) constantly interact to determine one's attentional state.

For example, although an external stimulus may effectively attract someone's attention, a lack of motivation for the proposed focus will quickly divert his/her attention to another item. On the other hand, one may be motivated to focus on a certain item (because, for example, he/she is pursuing a certain goal) but an inappropriate presentation of the content (at the perceptual level) may hinder the establishment of the desired focus. This section analyses how attention may be supported at the deliberative level. It considers situations in which the knowledge worker:

• Loses motivation and/or stops actively pursuing a worthwhile focus;

• Loses track of the planned sequence of activity and/or experiences difficulties in prioritising his/her activity;

• Does not make best use of time resources or losses track of time

• Has difficulties in selecting the most effective focus for the goal of the group

Many experiments, as well as folk wisdom, tell us that the loss of motivation, together with tiredness, is one of the main reasons for losing focus of attention. Motivations may be provided in many different forms. In certain situations it may be enough to remind the knowledge worker what he/she was doing, in other cases it may be necessary to supply some help in order to encourage him/her pursuing the activity.

Supporting attention at the operational level

Different approaches can be proposed to support the actions of the user in a way that is more attention effective, i.e. leading to the same result whiles mobilising less cognitive effort. A first way of supporting users at the operational level is to help them to be more effective at managing several tasks. For instance some mechanisms may make the interruption of tasks less disturbing, whereas some other mechanisms may help users in recovering more easily from an interruption. A second approach consists in providing mechanisms automating some tasks that can help reducing cognitive load. For instance a notification mechanism or a watch list may relieve users from the need to dedicate a portion of their attention to the monitoring of a particular source of information

Supporting attention at the meta-cognitive level

Finally individual and group attention may be supported by fostering a better understanding of the way attention is managed. Support at this level consists in the provision of mechanisms helping knowledge workers in observing their current attention related practices, and contribute to the learning process of more attention effective practices.

For as managing attention this way becomes habitual, you’ll find you can routinely contribute to more important work, and build a great reputation for it. Just a couple of hours of uninterrupted time every morning can move you out of the “where did my day go” club and into “top performer” ranks, where the rewards are respect, compensation, and promotability. And all of this can happen while still leaving plenty of time to handle the lesser tasks that come every day with every job.

By creating a physical “attention zone,” it will train others not to interrupt your do-not-disturb status and signal your brain that it’s time for deep work. In the end, the habit of managing attention – arguably the most valuable resource, particularly at work – will increase your value to your team and enhance your reputation within the company, while still leaving you plenty of time to handle the rest of your day.

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