Attention Is All You Have
How will you spend it?
Attention is the very essence of our consciousness, the core output of our minds. Everything we do, think, and feel is filtered through the lens of our attention. It's the cognitive thread that weaves through the fabric of our experiences, binding together our perception of the world and driving our interaction with it.
Whether we are engaged in a complex task at work, playing with our kids, conversing with someone, exploring a new idea, or even daydreaming, our attention is at play, guiding us through the vast landscape of our minds.
To frame the worth of human attention, it helps to think about how it can be exchanged for money or other valuable resources.
Selling Attention
In the working world, your job often boils down to trading your attention for a paycheck.
Your employer expects you to focus on certain tasks or solve specific problems. Engineering Managers and Software Engineers concentrate on solving business problems with technology, pilots focus on flying planes, and athletes direct their attention to training and competing. Essentially, when you show up to work, you're selling blocks of your attention to your employer for a set price — your salary or hourly wage.
Simply showing up to work isn’t sufficient. If you don't deliver the required attention and the outcomes it produces, you risk losing your job.
Buying Attention
On the flip side, as an individual, you can also purchase other people's attention for specific needs. Hiring a babysitter allows you to delegate the attention required for childcare, freeing you to focus on work or other tasks. When you hire a lawyer, you're buying specialized attention to navigate a legal challenge.
Even hailing an Uber is a form of this trade — you pay for the driver's attention on the road so you can use your travel time as you wish, whether that's catching up on emails, scrolling through social media, or reading a substack.
By buying someone else’s attention, you're buying the freedom to direct your own attention elsewhere — sometimes with the aim of selling it for a higher price.
But attention isn’t just a commodity that can be traded!
Using Attention for Fulfillment
In fact, the some of the most satisfying things to do with attention is to “use” on things that bring joy and meaning to life — immersing yourself in a hobby, pursuing entertainment, savoring a good meal, or giving your undivided attention to people you care about. The act of being fully attentive to your loved ones isn't just time well-spent; it's the essence of meaningful relationships. Attention directed inward is a powerful tool that unlocks meditation and self-care.
Now that we’ve explored the humanness of attention and how it’s perhaps the most important resource we possess, let’s shift gears to explore its role in boosting effectiveness — including excelling at your job or in the nuanced field of Engineering Management.
Achieving success in management is intrinsically linked to your skill in handling multiple priorities adeptly. Engineering Managers often find themselves balancing multiple tasks, tackling diverse problems, and pushing forward several initiatives — all simultaneously. Which brings us to classifying types of attention when we’re processing multiple tasks (not unlike multi-head attention).
Classes of Attention
Selective attention
This is the most potent kind of attention. It’s ability to focus on a specific task while ignoring noise. For example, when you're engrossed in a book in a crowded cafe, you're using selective attention to focus on the task and tuning out the conversations, music, and noise around you.
Some other examples of selective attention: deeply thinking about a problem, thinking about an upcoming vacation while commuting, or actively listening during a 1:1.
Alternating attention
This is the ability to switch your focus back and forth between tasks that require different cognitive demands. If you're writing code and then switch to replying to a slack message, then switch back to your IDE, you're alternating your attention between two things.
It’s possible to alternate attention between several tasks at once, but the act of alternating itself consumes a sliver of attention. The attention cost for switching increases with the number of tasks you're handling; in other words, the more tasks you're trying to manage, the more "expensive" it becomes to move your focus from one to another. Software developers often refer to this as the cost of switching context.
Divided attention
This is the ability to process two or more different demands simultaneously. For example, you use divided attention when you're cooking and listening to music. Or holding up a conversation while driving a car. Or listening to music while writing code. Most of us can attend to two or at most three distinct tasks simultaneously.
Note, it’s harder to divide attention across two consumptive tasks. For example, try listening to a podcast while reading something – you’ll most likely end up ignoring one over the other.
It’s also hard to divide attention across two productive tasks – for example, you can’t simultaneously write two emails (you can alternate, though).
As Engineering Manager
…it helps to be intentional in what modality of attention you want to use throughout your day.
Selective
If you’re in a 1:1 you want to selectively direct your attention to listening (a.k.a active listening) and tune out notifications and most importantly not be passively thinking about something else.
Selective attention is also a natural choice when it comes to any form of “deep work” like producing a document or writing code. When you selectively pay attention to something, you’re choosing to be fully present and engaged. Every time you find your attention wander, you want to bring it back to the present moment. If you’re looking to cultivate a leadership presence in meetings, this is perhaps the simplest trick in the book — be present!
Alternating
If you have blocked off an hour to “catch up on work”, you most likely want to alternate your attention between a few tasks — ping someone on Slack, look through your email inbox while you’re waiting on a response, spend a few minutes updating a dashboard, etc.
As always, it helps to be intentional and go into this mode by identifying a few things that you can simultaneouly process upfront. If you don’t, you may end up chasing rabbits and not have made any real progress when your hour is up and it’s time to jump into the next meeting.
Dividing
Truth be told, I haven’t found great success with dividing my attention across two work-related things so I generally tend to avoid this strategy when. I’d be lying if I said I have never scrolled through email or slack while listening to someone talk in a meeting — only to be caught off-guard when an important point was made, or worse, hearing my name.
It’s also easy for others to tell if you’re doing something on the side, so divide your attention at your own peril.
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