‘We just want to devote ourselves to art. We’re all dragged at increasing speed towards the grave. Any picture we don’t make will not be made by somebody else. So we don’t need to go shopping, we don’t have to cook. It’s a very, very simple life devoted to art.’
– Gilbert Proesch, one half of the artists, Gilbert & George

‘We’ve trained ourselves to clear the head. It’s an extraordinary thing. It feels like a desert in front of us, panning out, which we can do something with.’
– George Passmore, Gilbert and George

A lot of books have been written on the topic of ‘time management’ but precious little is ever written about a more subtle skill: ‘attention management’. This chapter will look at some of the critical attention management habits that will propel you to Productivity Ninja status.

In this chapter, we’re going to focus on helping you manage your attention in four main ways:

1. Scheduling work based on your level of attention
2. Protecting your attention from distractions
3. Improving your attention by increasing your brain’s performance
4. Creating new ‘pockets of attention’

But before we get onto that, let’s look at why attention management is so crucial in our age of information overload.

KNOWLEDGE WORK MEANS YOU’RE NOT JUST THE WORKER, BUT THE BOSS TOO

Remember the days when you did jobs that didn’t require any judgement? You worked behind the bar somewhere, or in a cake factory. These are the types of jobs where you have a big box of cherries, and down the conveyor belt comes a line of cakes with icing on them. Your job is so simple you could do it in your sleep: put one cherry on top of each cake. Not much to procrastinate about there, not many opportunities to look foolish or lose control over, and not many issues for your brain to take home at the end of the shift. In fact, these kinds of jobs use precious little of your attention at all, are easily done with a hangover and you never really need to be on top form. Sounds wonderful in some ways, doesn’t it? They also have a satisfyingly simple success indicator – if you put all the cherries on all the cakes, you win. If you missed off half of them, that’s not so good. It’s easy with such jobs for a supervisor to check up on you and see how you’re doing, and it’s easy for a boss to see the bigger picture and see whether it’s all working.

You might at this point be harbouring a slight pang to get back to the simplicity of these kinds of jobs. The truth is, very few of these jobs exist anymore – most of them are now automated by computers or machines, and the ones that are left are the bar jobs and coffee shop gigs that don’t pay very well anyway. Many years ago, Peter Drucker predicted this future. He predicted the end of the industrial age and the dawn of the information age. People would move from the kind of functional jobs in bars and cake factories and into ‘knowledge work’ jobs. Knowledge work is about adding value or creating value out of information rather than performing a specific function. If you think about it, that’s at the heart of what you do today, and many of the UK’s more industrialized cities are now making the transition to entry level knowledge work jobs on a huge scale.

Imagine that your job involves arriving at 9am at the cake factory, getting handed a large box of cherries and as the cakes come down the conveyor belt, you put one cherry on each of the cakes. If the conveyor belt slows down, so do you. If the conveyor belt stops, you just … wait. You have scheduled breaks, scheduled relaxation time over lunch and you can predict your finish time to the minute, or even the second. Imagine it’s 5pm on Friday at the cake factory and you’re about to go home and start your weekend. Do you think you’ll even think about cherries before 9am on Monday? Do you think you’ll be sat there on Sunday evening at home, worrying about the potential things that could go wrong in your job tomorrow? Of course not. While there may well be boredom in that job, there’s clarity. It’s really easy to know exactly what you need to do, how you’re getting on and what you might need to do to improve.

Your knowledge work job is different from putting cherries on the cakes in the factory because in your work there are so many levels of ambiguity: in the cake factory scenario, imagine all of a sudden having to be not just the person putting the cherries on the cakes but also the person checking up on the cherries, the person deciding what time the shift starts and how fast the conveyor belt goes, the person occasionally filling in for the icing person when they’re on leave, the person running the shop floor and also the strategic CEO responsible for deciding whether, with all this emphasis on healthy eating in the outside world these days, the factory should just sell cherries as part of fruit salads and ditch the cakes altogether. It’s exhausting isn’t it? Welcome back to your world.