WRITTEN BY Kate Finan
CO-OWNER OF BOOM BOX POST
I recently listened to an episode of the Ezra Klein Show podcast titled “Tired? Distracted? Burned-Out? Listen to This.” I don’t know about you, but as a parent of two small children, a business co-owner in a time of entertainment industry upheaval, and a creative professional who tries to eke out every last ounce of creative juice that I have on a daily basis, this title really spoke to me. I must say that I was riveted for the next hour as the host, Ezra Klein, and special guest, Gloria Mark, University of California Irvine professor and author of the book Attention Span, discussed how attention is not just a productivity tool, but part of our well-being and a precious resource that can be easily depleted, but also fairly easily restored if you know what to do.
Beyond grabbing my attention for the duration of the episode, the unique angle from which they viewed attention really stayed with me, and I couldn’t help feeling an almost magnetic compulsion to share this new viewpoint on attention and how it shapes our current work culture, especially in our creative field of post-production sound. As someone who regularly mentors and trains young sound editors and mixers, my mentees often come to me with questions about how to stay focused, how to avoid getting distracted or burned out, or how to structure their days in order to tap into their highest levels of creativity. In our industry, it’s easy to get bogged down by the sheer workload, and even easier to find yourself with more and more internal resistance toward starting creative tasks the longer you work.
So, despite not being an expert in this field, I have decided to ignore my inner monologue crying out for me to “stay in my lane!” and have decided to write a blog post sharing some information that Gloria Mark outlined regarding this incredibly important subject, and offering my own musings about how we might collectively change our workplace culture or rethink our own views on what it means to be truly focused. As a sound-professional and not an attention guru, I strongly urge you to listen to the podcast yourself, or better yet, check out Gloria Mark’s book to be educated by a true scholar on this topic. All facts in this post should be attributed to Gloria Mark and her remarkable research, and all sound industry musings are my own.
What is Attention, and Can We Use It Up?
Our culture acts like attention is a bottomless resource, but it turns out that, in fact, it is not. We start with an attention tank (in scientific terms, our cognitive resources), and that tank gets depleted as we focus. If we use too much without replenishing it, then our executive function (the CEO of our brains in charge of decision-making) gives way and we experience burnout. This is not the colloquial “I’m so burnt out” that’s often bandied around, but instead a true inability to find the energy to get work done or having difficulty meeting everyday tasks socially or at work.
These symptoms can be debilitating, yet a huge number of workers (40% of study respondents, according to Mark) have reported at least some symptoms. Much like becoming injured if we push our bodies to train too hard at the gym, it turns out that we can also be mentally injured by pushing our attention past its limits.
Mounting Problem with Attention
According to Gloria Mark, technology use has propelled us into a landscape where our attention is becoming more and more taxed. As opposed to pre-internet jobs, we are now spending 90% of our time at our desks. This makes sense, since we can do pretty much any task on our phones and computers. In fact, e-communication such as Slack and email have become so ubiquitous that they have added a literal second workload on top of our actual jobs, with the average worker checking their email 77 times (!!!!) per day. Furthermore, with instantaneous communication quite literally at the tips of our fingers, it has become harder to detach from our work at the end of the day, and therefore nearly impossible to re-attach at the start of the next day.
Breaks that Aren’t Breaks
I think that I can safely say that all of us attempt to take breaks from this crushing workload, especially when we’re creatively taxed. But, unfortunately, we’re also part of an agreed upon workplace culture where we feel like we need to look like we’re working even during our breaks. There’s something that feels almost shameful about overtly taking time for ourselves. So, we often resort to breaks that aren’t actually breaks, where we use the implements of work (phones, laptop, etc.) to do non-work things like scrolling social media or reading news articles. But this is not a break, it’s an interruption, and it only serves to further deplete our attention resources rather than refilling them.
This idea made me think about how much my friends and family professed their love for the newfound freedom of working from home during and after the pandemic. Whenever it came up, almost everyone mentioned how great it was that they could take a break and throw in a load of laundry, or wash a few dishes. On the surface, this seems like a comment on being able to do chores throughout the day, but I think it might have been more of a collective sigh of relief at feeling empowered to take those true breaks to replenish their attention tanks.
Filling Your Tank: Using Your “Little Mind” Instead of Your “Big Mind”
The good news is that you don’t need to be stuck in a cycle of further depleting your tank every time you attempt to take a break, and it’s not as hard as it sounds to replenish it. But, you will need to purposefully ignore the urge to take a “break” by just shifting to another source of information, another emotional distraction (hello election news and social media), or other to-do list item, and instead give your brain an actual break from input and stimulation to break the cycle. Here are some ideas:
Go outside
Take a walk in nature without your phone/headphones
Meditate/contemplate
Have a conversation
Play a mindless game
Do rote activities (knit, bounce a ball off the wall, peel potatoes)
Apparently, the Broaden and Build Theory posits that improving your emotional well-being can drastically improve your physical, emotional, psychological, and social resources. That means that taking these breaks where you use your “little mind” instead of your “big mind,” as Maya Angelou once described it, could indeed make you more creative by refilling your tank.
A Four Step Plan for Better Attentional Well-Being
Finally, Klein asked Mark what her Three Month Plan for Better Attentional Well-Being would be, and this is what she suggested:
Take sufficient breaks and think intentionally about scheduling empty space in your day. Get comfortable with the beauty of empty space.
Figure out which chronotype you are (colloquially referred to as early bird, moderate, or night owl), and then rather than creating to-do lists, “design” your day. Think about when your peak focus times are, and then do the work that requires your highest level of focus/creativity during those times. Figure out when your least focused times are, and schedule your empty space or exercise during those.
Practice forethought by imagining how your current actions will affect you at the end of your day. For example, imagine yourself at home eating dinner with your family and relaxing with a glass of wine instead of continuing to feverishly work toward deadlines late into the night. This will help to fend off the urge to self-impose interruptions.
Make daily goals: a task goal for the day and an emotional goal for the day. What do you want to accomplish, and how do you want to feel? Goals like this don’t last long, so be sure to refresh them each morning.
Adjusting Your Own Workplace Culture
As a boss, I can say without a doubt that my employees feel the same cultural push as everyone else to appear to be productive throughout their day and therefore deny themselves true brain breaks. But, I can also say without a doubt that I want to see them going for walks, taking a quick nap on their office couch, or having a chat with a friend in the kitchen. I would never view that as slacking off or a symptom of being unproductive. In fact, I would be overjoyed that they were taking a moment for themselves. I’ve been in that same editorial or mixing chair for long hours, struggling to keep my foot on the creative gas pedal.
So, I would implore you to share some of these ideas with your boss, and open an honest conversation about what a break looks like to them, how they would feel about seeing you do a non-work task while at work, or if they would truly mind if you disappear on a walk for 15 minutes. You might be surprised by their answers. And, if you’re really lucky, they may even give you some dishes to wash.
Sources
“Tired? Distracted? Burned-Out? Listen to This.” The Ezra Klein Show, Apple Podcasts, January 25, 2024, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tired-distracted-burned-out-listen-to-this/id1548604447?i=1000640637870
Mark, Gloria. Attention Span, Hanover Square Press; Original edition, January 10, 2023