3 Ways to Focus Your Attention

As a web worker, you’re probably used to living in a world of continuous information flow, with many things competing for your attention. Probably you even fall into one of the “elite tech users” groups from the recent Pew Internet & American Life Project report, which found that 73% of us don’t feel overloaded by information. But even if you’re not overloaded, you still need to deal with one of the big questions of trying to keep up with too many things at once: how do you make sure that you’re not going to miss anything important? Here are three suggestions to help you pick out the things that you need to focus on.

1. Set up “virtual flappers.” In Gulliver’s Travels, a flapper was a servant whose job it was the whack the nobles of Laputa over the head with a stick when there was something going on that they should pay attention to. In our brave new digital world, it’s easy to automate this function, if you can come up with keywords that capture your interests. Go over to Google News and do a search on your chosen keyword. Subscribe to the RSS or Atom feed of the resulting page. Do the same with Google Blog Search. (There are other services offering similar functionality, but I find this combination covers everything for me.) Now you’ll get pinged in your feed reader whenever someone is talking about your subject of choice. The key to making this work is to spend some time seriously tuning your search terms, so you catch what you need without getting overwhelmed by noise.

2. Rely on other eyes. Whether or not you buy into the whole “wisdom of crowds” idea, it’s only reasonable that having more people watch for something increases your chance of spotting it. We’ve written before about the usefulness of Twitter for spotting trends and news. Similarly, if you take the time to build up a del.icio.us network, you can benefit from the surfing and bookmarking habits of trusted friends. To effectively use social networking to help your attention, though, you must be selective: following the front page of Digg might be amusing, but it’s unlikely to bring you the news you need to do your job. Anecdotally, the best networks for swapping and tracking useful information seem to be somewhere in the 50 to 100 people range.

3. Train your brain. We’re all born with one, but it’s petty clear that the grey matter behind our eyes doesn’t work the same for everybody. A recent study suggests that meditation training can help you pay attention better and not miss important details, even when you’re not meditating. Similar effects have been reported for yoga. For those with a more Western bent, you can look into free memory training (there are a variety of commercial programs in this area as well). And don’t neglect the obvious: getting enough sleep and eating regular meals will help keep you functioning well enough that you don’t miss things.

What techniques do you use to make sure that you don’t miss the important pebbles in the ever-flowing stream?

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