a quick thought on attention

I was going through my old bookmarks today and came across this short manifesto from Design Observer.

I’ve written before on the true attention cost of things, but rereading the manifesto got me thinking a little further:

Currently, we decide to bring things (be they artifacts or bits of information) by a simple ratio… utility/cost.  Both metrics are easy to measure (utility either subjectively or objectively), so there is little attention required (irony?) to make that calculation.

What if there was a simple, low-overhead method of tracking our attention?  A sort of mint.com for attention where I can check in every few days and see where my attention has been spent. I was stunned to see how much I spent on restaurants. I would love to have a similar revelation with regards to my attention.

I work in a consultancy and have been using some OTS software to track my time (it’s called Toggl, I’ll do a writeup on it someday).  The overhead is low enough that it makes it worth my while in a work context for obvious reasons, but it is still too high for everyday use.

I just need something better…

I’ve written before on the attention cost of some of the things in our lives, and have thought about it much since.
Currently, we decide to bring things (be they artifacts or bits of information) by a simple ratio… utility/cost.  Both of those are easy to measure (utility either subjectively or objectively), so there little attention (irony?) needs to be allocated to making that calculation.
What if there was a simple, low-overhead method of tracking our attention?  A sort of mint.com for attention where I can check in every few days and see where my attention has been spent.
I work in a consultancy and have been using some OTS software to track my time.  The overhead is low enough that it makes it worth my while in a work context for obvious reasons, but it is still too high for everyday use.
I just need something better…

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Tagged as: attention

Article by chris loughnane

Chris is Design Engineer + Sustainability Advocate at a Boston area design consultancy and has written 127 sweet posts for the Product Development Notebook.

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