Be Effective: 3 Ways To Save Energy Using Attention
You need energy to focus. But you need focus to save energy.
Common sense dictates that you need energy to pay attention. While that’s true, so is the opposite — if you pay attention, you can save massive amounts of the energy needed to be an effective human.
It’s amazing how much energy you use and lose daily. What’s more amazing is how much energy you waste. The growing addictions of the modern world — push notifications, social media, the pressure to multitask — only encourage this wastage.
Recently, I started using attention to preserve energy. I’d direct attention to energy-preserving activities and divert it from energy-drainers.
I had major results — more energy throughout the day and increased productivity. I achieve each day’s milestones earlier and faster and end the day buoyant. Now, I have more energy to give to people and hobbies I love. Here’s how to do it.
What is attention?
So the science goes, attention is a complex process involving filtering, balancing, and attaching significance to the perceptions received by the brain. While passive attention is directed by the environment (the sound of a gunshot is impossible to ignore), active attention involves voluntarily selecting and focusing on one perception above others.
But here, what’s paramount is subjective attention. How do you actually experience attention, and how can you direct it?
To attend to something is to actively notice it. It’s to choose — through intention— to give your mental resources to one input and not another.
Here’s an experiment. Once you’ve read this paragraph, focus your attention on the smiley below. You’ll be aware of other things, but try to narrow your attention — the crosshairs of focus — on the smiley, and nothing else, for 30 seconds. Use the timer on your phone or computer, and give it a go.
😄
Hard, right? Most skimmed right past. But those who tried will have probably noticed how difficult it is to stay focused on one thing for 30 seconds without thoughts or distractions banging on the door of awareness, demanding attention.
That’s because, in this era of email and push notifications, the ‘attention muscle’ in most brains has grown weak.
And this comes at a cost. Distractions drain your energy, leaving less to fuel focus on what’s important.
Learning to pay attention — through meditation and training—is the remedy. When you meditate, you pay attention to the contents of your awareness — sights, sounds, or sensations — and develop concentration over time. It’s like taking your attention muscle to the gym.
Beyond meditation, here are three ways to preserve your energy by guarding your attention throughout the day.
1. Don’t panic, don’t multitask
According to neuroscientists, multitasking drains the brain’s energy. Because your brain actually can’t multitask. When you “multitask”, you simply switch between activities at a rapid pace. This switching drains oxygenated glucose from the brain, which is the fuel it needs to focus on a task.
Last week in a departmental meeting, the partners scolded the team for not responding to clients’ emails right away. According to them, we need to respond immediately, to keep clients happy and retain their business.
Yet this is the exact wrong advice to give to a team if you want them to be effective. By pushing your team to multitask, you’re fostering energy wastage. Rather, the team should batch tasks like email (see the 4-Hour Work Week) and focus on one task at a time.
To save energy and increase productivity, focus on one task at a time. Apply your scarce mental reserves fully to that task, and do it well.
2. Remove — don’t ignore — distractions
A 2010 study of the ‘attention drainage effect’ observed the impact of playing different genres of music while 133 Taiwanese college students attempted a reading comprehension task.
The authors found that music of higher intensity — Hip Hop as opposed to Classical — was more distracting and negatively affected performance on the test.
Distractions worsen performance. But they also drain energy. There’s a whole Wikipedia page on ‘Directed Attention Fatigue’ — a condition that develops when the brain clusters that suppress distractions get overworked.
The brain loses energy by inhibiting distractions as you focus on a task. So give your brain a break by removing those distractions in the first place.
I have a coworker who talks while she works. It’s very distracting. But instead of forcing my brain to burn energy suppressing the sound of her voice, I take noise-canceling headphones to the office and work to Binaural Beats. This removes the distraction completely and gives my brain a break.
To save energy for the high-value tasks of the day, remove distractions. Turn off email and push notifications, listen to non-distracting music with noise-canceling headphones, and resist the temptation to do ‘warm-up’ tasks before your main task.
3. Build your focus
It’s possible to strengthen your attention muscle over the long term, such that your brain can maintain focus for longer periods of time using less energy.
Ali Mese describes how he trained his brain to focus for more and more time through meditation and the process of myelination in this piece.
Practicing meditation helps you to zone into the feeling of paying attention, first to your breath, then the wider field of awareness, and then — hopefully — consciousness itself.
Applying that feeling of attention to your work for more and more time during the day encourages myelination — described as:
“An increase in the fatty sheath surrounding neuronal processes and fibers that increases the efficiency of electrical transmission.”
Simply speaking, when you focus for longer hours than you’re used to, the clusters of neurons responsible for focus experience myelination. Myelination means that the insulating sheath (“rubber”) around the axons (“wire”) of those neurons thickens over time. As those sheaths thicken, less energy is required for them to consistently fire.
For Ali Mese, this grew his ability to focus for long periods of time, an experience he describes as “effortless focus”.
The idea is to literally practice paying attention to a task for longer and longer periods while you work. I’m doing this now from 9 am to 12 am daily, where I focus on one or two tasks nothing else in that time. I plan to extend that to 9 am — 1 pm, and then do the same in the afternoon.
To build up your brain until it needs less energy to focus for more hours, practice paying attention through meditation and then train your brain by focusing for longer and longer stretches.
Last Words
Your attention is your most powerful tool. You need it to produce good work, great art, and projects that create lasting value. But you need energy to use it effectively. Here are three ways to flip common sense around and use attention to preserve energy:
- Don’t multitask — switching between tasks creates the illusion of productivity while wasting energy.
- Avoid distractions — Distractions drain energy that the brain uses inhibiting them. Give your brain a break and remove distractions yourself.
- Build your focus — practice paying attention using meditation and train your brain’s attention muscle by focusing for longer.