The one thing that will define your life

‘At the end of your days, your life will have been what you paid attention to.’  –  William James

Time management is old hat. In the modern world, it’s better to talk about productivity generally. We can have all the time in the world, but unless we manage the most vital part of our lives, our attention, we are destined to become hopelessly distracted and wasteful.

Why?

Because the most addictive psychological tools ever created now follow us everywhere  –  through our smartphone. This is the digital realm of the attention merchants.

This is a problem, as it is our attention that determines our impact in every sense. The pioneering psychologist, William James, wrote:

Attention … is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought, localisation, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatter brained state.

In this modern world, one of my personal mantras is:

Control your tech, or it will control you.

Tech giants and app developers are slowly yielding to pressure to move towards enabling us to use their devices and products more mindfully. Apple has announced their ‘digital wellness features’, following on from Google doing the same a month before. Maybe we can hope for technology that is more human-centred, but it’s not time to sing ‘kumbayah’ just yet.

Advertising has never been so pervasive as it is today. In fact, we can track the genesis of the advertising business model to the incredible article in The Sun in 1835 of moon bats found on the moon (some early fake news). But advertising really exploded during the 20th century (Mad Men binge anyone?) with the rise of print media and television alongside the consumer economy. And in case you haven’t noticed, our media consumption has kinda changed.

The day you read this, 70 per cent of all advertising revenue will come from digital sources.

It’s supremely obvious these technologies have huge impact on our ways of connecting, working and learning, and even our elections (i.e. the Cambridge Analytica firestorm), and is why print media has been shedding staff or transitioning into digital for the last decade.

One of my favourite questions to pose is this: Who are the customers of Facebook or Google?

All of us right?

Ah, wrong.

Their actual customers, are advertisers. Of course they are. They are the ones that actually pay them for a service or product.

Wait, so if we are not the customer, what are we? Simple, we are the product.

This is not inherently terrible, they do offer a free service after all, but the trade off is just not well understood by many, and turns out our data was never as secure as promised. As part of the US Senate’s Committee into Data Protection, Mark Zuckerberg was made to testify and answer their hard thought-out questions. And two things became obvious.

1. Many US Sentators don’t understand how the internet works (cue meme generators!)
2. Some also don’t understand the current digital business model. Zuckerberg even had to spell it out when asked how Facebook makes money.

‘Senator, we run ads.’