High-Quality Attention Diets
How to protect your attention like a boss and ensure your precious time is well spent
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I have just returned from almost three weeks away from home, and I’m coming back committed to making some changes to my Attention Diet. My last newsletter was a call to “pay attention to what you pay attention to” and being away for an extended period of time certainly helped me do that with clarity.
Maybe you’re like me, and over time, you slip into bad habits for how and where you spend your time and attention. When you spend a decent chunk of time away from your regular routines and cues, though, it makes it easier to see how trapped we can become in unhealthy attention habits.
For example, being away helped me realize and confirm:
I spend too much time checking and responding to emails, especially early in the morning
I spend too much time on LinkedIn, of all places
I check the news too often, and it’s not helpful or valuable
I book too many Zoom calls a day
I respond to an enormous amount of text messages every day, usually with a degree of urgency that pulls me out of my current focus
At night, I spend too much time scrolling social media
As a result, I’m subconsciously deprioritizing the stuff that actually requires focus and attention, like writing, work projects, and reading. Too often, I end up getting to those at the end of the day when my attention and energy are shot.
Attention-wise, this is a horrible diet. Having an extended break from these bad habits was a real eye-opening gift. So, I’ve decided to embark on a major Attention Health Kick.
The Attention Diet Stakes Are High
There are a lot of parallels between how we think about a healthy food diet and a high-quality Attention Diet. And even though it may not seem like it, the stakes of where you place your precious, limited attention are high.
We live in an era where we have never been exposed to more messages attempting to get our attention, where algorithms are designed to manipulate us into endless doom-scrolling with dopamine-inducing intermittent variable reward strategies, and where business models reward tactics like generating outrage, creating controversy, and spreading falsehoods.
It’s so easy to have our time and attention hijacked by the attention equivalent of sugary breakfast cereals, high fructose corn syrup, and fast food.
So, going one step further than paying attention to what we pay attention to, let’s actively consider what a healthy Attention Diet looks like.
Evaluating Your Current Attention Diet
Here are some diet-themed questions that might help you generate some insights about the quality of your attention choices:
What’s the junk food in your Attention Diet? Are there sites or apps that suck up tons of your time without providing much in return?
What are attention equivalents of addictive things like alcohol, smoking, or vaping that we use to escape reality or discomfort? What algorithms and products are knowingly designed to be addictive? Are they actually creating any value for us, or are they putting us on a never-ending dopamine-seeking hamster wheel?
Are there any carcinogens in your media diet? Are you giving your attention to things that actively make you feel bad? Angry? Outraged? Depressed? Scared? Hopeless?
Much like the variety of “experts” in health, who are the influential people claiming to be experts in their fields without any experience or credentials? And who are the real ones you can actually trust?
Media literacy is like reading the labels on food. How can you do your own research to make sure that the advice you’re following is based on real expertise and not propaganda?
Get Rid of the Junk Food
What are some quick and easy ways to instantly improve the quality of your Attention Diet?
Review your notification settings and shut off almost everything
Actively use the Focus Mode settings on your phones and computers when you’re doing work that requires deep focus
Put severe limits on apps and platforms designed to suck up all your time.
Even better, hide, delete, or leave the services that aren’t good uses of your attention.
Utilize focusing strategies like the Pomodoro technique.
Go on an unsubscribing binge and get rid of the spam or unwanted emails that flood your inbox.
Don’t get sucked into an email vortex first thing in the morning. Protect your best hours—block off time in your calendar to work on what is most important to you and while you are at your freshest.
Prioritize Healthy Attention Ingredients
The harder but vital part of building a healthy Attention Diet is to spend some real time figuring out what is truly most important to you. What are the best possible uses of your time, and where are the opportunities to arrange your schedule and life to prioritize those more often?
Much like the Food Guide, what would be the ingredients and portions in your ideal attention pie chart? It might include:
Tasks and projects that are important but not necessarily urgent
Social time with family and friends
Hobbies and creative projects
Reading
Exercise
Mindfulness
Healthy eating (!)
Time outdoors
Sleep
And yes, it might include some short bursts of attention junk food like social media because it’s fun and that’s what we’re in the mood for.
There are no right or wrong answers, and the ingredients in a healthy Attention Diet will be unique for everyone. Being fully aware of how you’re spending your attention is what matters.
Then, the key is to spend the time determining what the most valuable and meaningful uses of your attention are, where you’re spending your time instead of your priorities, and creating a plan to cut down on the junk and double down on the important stuff.
Beware Wall-E World
If we’re not active participants in determining how and where we place our attention, it will be determined for us by those who most benefit from hijacking it. And when we fall victim to that, huge swaths of our time and attention disappear daily. Days, weeks, months, and years of our finite lives will go by with enormous swaths of time being poorly used.
Doing all this is, unfortunately, hard work! As usual, though, the hard work is the path to the good stuff. Let’s not all end up like the world in Wall-E. Sometimes it feels like we’re not far off…
Earn It Updates
A huge thank you to Porchlight Books for promoting Earn It as one of the Best Business Books of the Year. I’m heading to NYC this week for the Porchlight event and can’t wait to meet the other nominated authors!
Earn It Featured in Entrepreneur
It was a real thrill this week to see Entrepreneur include Earn It on this list of books that inspire leadership and boost productivity. It was also a treat to be the same list as Michael Bungay Stanier’s amazing new Do Something That Matters journal, which I highly recommend and am personally enjoying a lot.
Earn It World Tour 2025 Update
Copenhagen!
I had a phenomenal time at the Clever Content conference in Copenhagen and it was an honour to do the opening keynote. I learned a ton from the other speakers, including Harry Morton from Lower Street, Hannah Freegard at the FT, Mats Bax at NoA Elevate, and the amazing closing keynoter, Andy Crestodina. The brilliant organizers behind the event, Stine Holmgaard and Jesper Laursen, have two more events coming up this spring. In NYC, check out Branded Content Day on April 3, and in London, you can go to Native Advertising Day on May 14th.
Australia!
Australians might just be the friendliest and most generous hosts on the planet. Huge thank you to fellow Page Two author Allan Dib and his wife Sarah Jane for hosting us for a day on the Mornington Peninsula. I love Allan’s books, The One Page Marketing Plan and Lean Marketing, and it was a treat to talk shop while seeing the spectacular area of the world they live in.
I was also very lucky to meet up with all sorts of Australian podcast and media royalty, including Ann Chesterman (Deadset Studios) and Robbie Buck (iconic radio host at ABC) who took us out for a great night in Sydney, Corey (ARN/iHeart) and Jessica Layton (CFO at Gewurzhaus) for an amazing evening in Melbourne, and Kellie Riordan (Deadset Studios), Matt Liddy (data visualization wizard at ABC), James Cridland (Podnews) and Sally Walker (scheduling wizard at ABC) for a wonderful night out in Brisbane. (As a total bonus in Melbourne, I got to see my old university friend and lung surgeon extraordinaire, Naveed Alam, who I haven’t seen in person in over 25 years!)
I don’t think I’ve experienced such generous hospitality before and I’m also now officially envious of everyone living in Australia. It’s mind-blowing! 🇦🇺🦘🐨
If your organization could benefit from one of my 2025 keynotes or a content strategy workshop, just reply back to this email, or reach out at steve.pratt@creativity-business.com.
What’s Earned My Attention Recently
Reset, by Dan Heath
Not only have I been a fan of Dan Heath’s books since I first read Made to Stick, but I’ve also had the pleasure of working with Dan on a couple of great podcast projects and he was kind enough to participate Earn It as one of the Attention Coaches.
Every time I talk to Dan, I learn a lot, so when he has a new book, it’s like having Dan inside my head downloading wisdom at scale. In his new book, Reset, Dan Heath show us all how to diagnose and fix the systems that are holding us back, and to create lasting change. It’s available now. YES!
Self-Promotion Doesn’t Work
This is about a year old, but I just found it and I love it.
writes about why we shouldn’t fret about the discomfort of self-promotion… because it doesn’t work anyway. Instead, why not try making phenomenal content that earns attention on its own? YES!Chris Hayes on Attention
Our attention is a wildly valuable resource, and some of the world’s most powerful corporations extract it at scale in increasingly sophisticated ways, leaving us feeling like bystanders to our minds. You might say we’ve built a machine for producing boredom and then entertainment to fill it in an endlessly accelerating and desperate cycle.
Chris Hayes, MSNBC host and author of The Sirens Call. (Can’t wait to read this book when it comes out on Tuesday)
I hope that even though it’s the end of January instead of the start, that it’s not too late to think about your Attention Diet for 2025. Thanks for reading—I’m very grateful for your time and attention!
Steve