Practices of Attention Retention ​

Practices for maintaining attention are quite numerous and diverse. Let's highlight personal practices based on the criterion of "duration of achieving a goal by an individual person," that is, personality practices for maintaining attention on a temporal scale:

• Moment - maintaining attention in conversation, dance (milliseconds - 1.5 minutes);
• Focus - maintaining attention on work tasks (minutes - hours);
• Daily cycle - maintaining attention throughout the day (usually the minimum scale for planning);
• Sprint or week - maintaining attention for a week at work and in leisure;
• Habits - maintaining attention on habit formation (weeks - months, up to a year);
• Lifestyle - maintaining attention to maintaining a certain lifestyle with a specific set of habits (from a year to several years);
• Self-Realization - maintaining attention on implementing major projects, achieving professional recognition, societal changes (several years - 15-20 years);
• Life - maintaining attention on life as a whole and at particular stages in particular (a person's whole life).

These temporal scales make sense when considering the activities of an individual person: within a few hours, a person can complete a work task and produce a work product. The scales for a company team will be slightly different and larger: for an organization, considering changes over a few hours does not make sense - significant changes will simply not have time to occur in the absolute majority of cases. Significant events may occur within a "sprint" timeframe, such as the release of a release or batch of goods (from a week to a month/several months). For even more complex agents, such as the collective of an entire enterprise, it makes sense to track significant changes starting from the scale of habits. The more complex the agent, the slower it will change.

For each of the individual time scales identified above, there are practices for maintaining attention that have the maximum effect on that particular scale. In the moment, attention is primarily maintained through ingrained high-quality automatisms. For example, in the case of pilots facing an emergency situation onboard, they often have only seconds to make decisions on their actions. This is why pilots are trained to perform actions that will save them in the majority of cases automatically, such as pushing the control wheel away to prevent a stall. In addition, in the moment, exo-tools can be useful, i.e., gadgets that allow actions to be adjusted on the fly. For example, while running, monitoring heart rate and reducing speed if the heart rate is too high.

On the scale of focus, timeboxing and the Pomodoro technique work well. Timeboxing is the allocation of time slots for work on a project/in a role. The Pomodoro technique, a well-known practice for focusing using "pomodoros" - 25-minute intervals, is suitable for focusing. An adaptation of this practice was suggested for use in Section 3. Pomodoro and timeboxing work well together: you can allocate, for example, 2 hours for working on a task using timeboxing, and take short breaks to "stretch your legs" every 5 minutes using the Pomodoro technique. Only after completing the two hours and obtaining a work product can you take a longer break with a "chaos window" for interactions in work chats.

Throughout the day, minimal planning occurs: what will happen. For people in higher positions, the minimum planning period is usually shifted to a week (sometimes more), but many live with a daily planning horizon. Throughout the day, there is a complete cycle of sleep-wakefulness and a decrease - restoration of performance. Good attention maintenance practices on a daily scale include accountability practices, such as the "Daily Questions" practice, a daily audit of what has been done (that day and the previous one), and summarizing. Planning for a week is often recommended for managers. The same practices that work on a daily scale are applied on a weekly scale, with additional leisure practices. Well-organized leisure time allows for "recharging," getting good emotions, and clearing the mind of worries. Rest is important but is often forgotten, so sometimes it is even recommended to plan the week starting from leisure. More details on leisure can be found in the chapter "Practices for organizing leisure activities" of the "Self-Development Practices" course.

On the scale of habit, environmental shaping practices appear: work environment, social environment, etc. It is through these practices that habits are formed. Habit, i.e., a behavioral automatism that triggers automatically when suitable conditions arise, is not established by focusing practices. Forcing oneself to go to a workout every time or constantly looking for time to audit work can be challenging. Many people struggle to form habits precisely because each individual attempt to apply the practice requires too much effort. It is easier to establish a habit when attention path design and conditions that enable the habit to trigger automatically are created. For example, if there is a desire to exercise in the morning, instead of rushing to prepare for the workout in the morning, it is recommended to do it from the evening:

• pack and prepare a sports bag, place it at the doorstep (making it hard to forget);
• go to bed early to wake up early (to have time for a workout and get to work) -

so that in the morning, you can wake up earlier, leave the house on time, and reach the gym. It is also likely that you will need to select a gym in advance (even before the evening), choose one that is convenient to visit near your workplace or home, and plan a route to it. All of this should be done so that in the morning, there is no need to think about what to do, and you can concentrate on the actual execution of the planned algorithm. Such design is recommended to be performed using reverse engineering: starting from the desired result and working backward to the first preparatory actions.

At work, it is recommended to keep the workplace organized: documents should be neatly organized, easy to find, and there should be no need to search for pens, pencils, etc. If a person works from home, it is even more important to set up a specially designated workspace: it will set the person up for work and help them concentrate. When a remote worker is at the workspace, the household members may have a "do not disturb" rule as well.

Additionally, to establish a habit, a person must also develop a calm attitude towards setbacks. Habits are not formed instantly: on average, habit formation takes 66 days (approximately 2 months), complex habits may take 9 months or even up to a year. Throughout this time, setbacks are inevitable -- especially at the beginning, when one must continuously do new unfamiliar actions, breaking old automatisms. For successful habit formation, it is important not to "stress over setbacks" but to "return to habit formation after a setback," keeping in mind the end goal and the time required for habit formation. Otherwise, all efforts will be directed not at acquiring the habit but at worrying about its absence.

If discussing individual habits and the implementation of specific small projects is convenient on the scale of a habit, then at the scale of lifestyle, it is about a set of habits that form a lifestyle. How time is distributed between family and work, whether there are hobbies/interests that are pursued for a long time for pleasure, how a typical day goes. Here, the focus is often on choosing a lifestyle that one would enjoy maintaining for years. This is important because fulfilling certain professional roles can seriously hinder fulfilling family roles - and vice versa. For example, for medical professionals working in emergency services, the schedule is quite chaotic, top managers often work much longer hours than linear employees, and so on. To maintain a lifestyle that supports the selected set of roles for years, it must be one that the person enjoys and that suits them well. If a mid-level manager no longer enjoys managing employees (preferring to work as an expert) it will be extremely difficult (if possible at all) to advance further in the role: managerial responsibilities will increase, demands will become more serious, and the opportunities to "produce results" will decrease. Therefore, maintaining attention at the lifestyle scale requires self-determination, working with dissatisfactions and desires: do you like the current lifestyle? Is what you are doing satisfactory? Do you understand your typical schedule now - and what it will be like if you continue to build a career in the same company and industry? It is also recommended to seek out those who already hold the desired position, study their lifestyle, find a mentor who can help achieve that lifestyle. And to change individual habits that do not align with the desired lifestyle using techniques from the habit scale.

At the scale of self-realization, strategizing and implementing "long" (strategic, infrastructural) projects take place. Practices for strategizing work and dealing with dissatisfactions are used here, and maintaining attention involves regularly comparing long-term plans with reality and making adjustments. The reason for highlighting this scale is that without it, one may fall into a trap. For example, constantly changing roles, acting as an "educational tourist," without achieving mastery and professional recognition.

Maintaining attention at this scale comes gradually with age: initially, experience is accumulated (personal, professional), personal abilities and inclinations are studied, and a resourceful "foundation" is built. The absence of desired self-realization often becomes one of the reasons for a midlife crisis.

Throughout a person's life, their ability to perceive and memorize information, physical strength, and health change. At this scale, one needs to meet people of different ages and observe how their ability to quickly build a mental model and orient themselves differs, how physical strength decreases, how much longer or shorter one needs to rest. These observations should then be applied to oneself and understood that at some point, strength will begin to decline - and one should be prepared for it. One can also familiarize themselves with age-related psychology descriptions. In addition, at the life scale, one can reflect on the legacy that will remain after the person. How will they be remembered and by whom post their death?

Similarly, time scales can be discussed for a company/organization--with the difference that the sprint is the minimum scale. Moreover, when considering the maximum scale, it is worth highlighting the "company's lifespan," which may significantly exceed the founder's lifetime. When contemplating how to build a company that can outlive the founder (become their legacy), a more resilient company that can withstand sudden changes in the world can be built. For example, one can find European companies that have survived revolutions, wars, economic crises, and more.

Where should one start and which practices should be implemented first? There is no single correct answer, but there are options. For example, in this course, it is suggested to begin with practices for maintaining attention over a week: assess the available time budget for the week, create a weekly schedule (during the training), then move on to daily and focused practices (time allocation throughout the day and Pomodoro/timeboxing practices). Difficulties in maintaining attention in a moment are usually physiological, so if it is challenging to concentrate for a minute, it is advisable to check with medical professionals for health issues and also rule out genuine distractibility and attention disorders. Only then should you transition to longer scales: habit scale, lifestyle scale, and so on.

Alternatively, one could analyze which changes are most challenging to maintain attention on and start with practices at that scale, descending to practices on smaller scales as needed.