Distracted Company. Attentive Company.

In September 2021, I’d just moved over to the Cabinet Office.

As soon as I arrived, I was put to work on a problem: the country seemed to be running out of fuel.

Notes from a relatively anodyne meeting about road haulage - which included a comment that a handful of BP’s UK filling stations were running low - had leaked, causing a wave of panic buying.

The irony was that the UK was far from being out of fuel: there was no shortage, if anything, a glut.

In years past this would have been a small story that would have fizzled out after a few days, yet this time something was different: no matter what we said, the queues continued.

Because for most people, after a lifetime of ignoring the news and nothing really bad happening, in early 2020, something really bad actually did.

As a result, we had to contend with an electorate that had - after months of daily press conferences and important new updates - swapped apathy for hyper-awareness.

Instead of a single minded focus on their day to day lives, focus is spread everywhere: the internet, the news, what’s going on at your nearest petrol station. .

In government we called it hyper-vigilance. If you were a personal productivity guru however, you’d probably call it distraction.

Distraction isn’t a new phenomenon: here’s Petrarch on the proliferation of books in 14thc. Italy:

This is not nourishing the mind, but killing and burying it with the weight of things or, perhaps, tormenting it until, frenzied by so many matters, this mind can no longer taste anything, but stares longingly at everything, like Tantalus thirsting in the midst of water.

Over the past few years, however, things do seem to have got worse.

Patrick Collison, Stripe CEO, agrees, a few weeks back tweeting:

As far as I can tell, one of the biggest changes across organisations over the past few years is simply the rise of distraction. The default often appears to be a kind of continuous partial attention. I'm not sure whether it's good or bad.

This, I think, is so striking because it talks of distraction on an organisational level.

At the personal level we can turn to writers like Cal Newport, adopt regimes of digital minimalism, and set our iphones to grayscale.

Or as parents, read books and blogs about the dangers of screens and the value of a play-based childhood.

But when it comes to avoiding building a distracted company, and building an attentive one instead, there’s not much out there.

What is a distracted company? Most of us know them when we see them, and definitely know them if we work in one.

I’d probably say the simplest definition is one where most employees work not one, but two jobs (both part time).

The first, the actual job they’re paid to do. The second, the job of a professional internet browser, is one they do for free.

Why are there more of them now than ever before? Well, I don’t think it’s the usual answer: technology.

Devices today are no more addictive than devices of a few years ago, the internet maybe even less.

Nor is it Slack or the rise of Instant messaging. Offices before 2020 were pretty disruptive places to be (on average office-workers are interrupted every eleven minutes).

Nor, I think, can we point to work from home: the best-in-class studies in this space have generally found that productivity, at worst, remains flat (and for more cognitively demanding roles, increases), when people work from home as part of a hybrid schedule.

So why is distraction now worse?

First, like the drivers queuing up outside the filling stations of Britain, post-Covid, I think we’ve all become more attuned to information.

This, at a time where geopolitics decided to go from incredibly boring to speedrunning the 1930s, can be pretty tiring.

It's why a lot of personal productivity advice right now is a dressed up version of “get up early and do your work before all of the day’s news starts and your day is poisoned instantly.”

Durine COVID we collectively got into the habit of being distracted, and we haven’t really kicked it.

Plus, as more and more of us become distracted, the social costs of being distracted have fallen: particularly so when it comes to work.

Ten years ago, if mid-meeting you start obviously typing away a Slack reply or search query on a laptop, and then glaze over for a few minutes, you’d be a bit of an outlier. Now, less so.

Second, the amount of work that you’re able to do well, whilst distracted, has fallen.

Most of the work that actually matters now sits higher up the cognitive stack (think decision making, creative thinking, and problem solving): the type of thinking that demands our undivided attention.

The amount of work you can do inattentively (copy and paste jobs, data entry) with headphones in and podcast going has shrunk.

Once this grunt-work goes out the window, the problem of distraction becomes all the more obvious.

Finally, the tools traditionally used to avoid distraction - placing people in offices for five-days a week so they could be observed, the promise of stock grants that 5x in value every eighteen months etc - are not quite hitting the mark in the same way.

Instead, companies have to fall back to telling their teams a credible story that what they are doing is useful, and important (something that very few are able to actually pull off), or shape their working environments to prioritise attentive work (something that very few companies want to pull off).

One answer is to just give up, and build the best distracted company possible.

Indeed, if you subscribe to the view that people (especially younger people) are more distracted than ever, it’s probably easier to make your company a great place for distracted workers, than it is to try and go the other way (great essay on this here).

This is actually probably the case for most companies out there.

But I think, alas that in a world where more and more companies are distracted, the greatest returns will accrue to those who build attentive companies.

Maybe a reason for the delta between big tech valuations versus the rest is that the former guarantee investors access to something that is now an increasing rarity: a workforce that consists of highly-competent people who really care about what they do.

So what are some of the things that attentive companies do?

The first is that they’re unashamedly pro-work. To understand why this is so important it’s worth rethinking distraction as less a cause of bad work, and more a symptom. Here’s Cal Newport:

Distraction is not the cause of problems in your work life, it’s a side effect. The real issue comes down to a question more important than whether or not you use Facebook too much: Are you striving to do something useful and do it so well that you cannot be ignored?

An attentive company is one that strives to make every employee feel like they can answer yes to the last part of that sentence.

Second, they change the way their teams work in order to limit distractions.

The default working patterns many companies still abide by are, fundamentally, the same working patterns that developed in the 20th century: a steady rate of constant work, squeezed into the same number of hours each week, punctuated regularly by meetings and other interactions.

But as the returns to focus become ever greater, you can imagine how this might change: limits on communication throughout the day to reduce disruption and maximise “bursty modes of communicating;” being explicit about the value of doing needle-moving focused work, even if it looks lazy; bringing back social censure for openly multitasking during meetings.

I always loved Peter Thiel’s rule at Paypal that every person in the company was responsible for doing just one thing at a time, and that if they wanted to discuss something else, that thing would need to be done first.

And what about hiring? In a world where the number one thing to optimise for is attentiveness, attentive companies focus on hiring people who know how to focus. I wrote a novel might become the next I worked at Google.

The first reply to Patrick Collison’s tweet was a quote from Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid and the father of photographic reconnaissance:

"My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn’t know they had.”

Land’s instinct is right: it’s focus that allows us all to experience the magic of doing great work.

But to unlock it, your teams need all the help they can get.

So, are you building a distracted company, or an attentive company?

aled@ashore.io