Reclaiming our Attention (and our Inbox)

In recent news, Meta and YouTube were found guilty of designing addictive products that harmed young people. There’s no doubt of the validity of that claim. However, they aren’t the only organizations responsible for co-opting attention.

My own attention deficit journey began this morning. I had nearly 3,000 unread emails in my inbox. What to do?

I looked at them the way you might look at a crime scene: who were the potential suspects? Sure, there were lots of suspects from a slew of different emails. SO, how to get filter through all these emails? Hmmm? What do many of them have in common?

They were appeals to real political interests and concerns. So, I did a search with one name made up of five letters. Interestingly, somewhere around three hundred emails had this one sequence of five letters and one name, in common. I selected all those emails with that name and clicked the trash icon. Whew! all those emails disappeared.

Like Meta and YouTube, almost all the senders were co-opting my attention, fear, and, in addition, wanted my money. Most of these organizations have shared my email address through buried privacy policy exceptions. I mostly share their concerns about the condition of the world (and this one name, five letters long). But, I can’t and won’t fritter away my attention on their needs. Nor should they be using my attention.

Even they aren’t alone. Many providers of meditation resources and retreats travel in promises that vary in meaning, research, and quality.

In my walk with our dog this morning, I pondered the simplicity of a walk. No social media. No trainers who are meditation sepcialists. Only the ability to breath in and out. In and out. To slowly place one foot in front of another. To notice our surroundings. And, like my dog, to enjoy watching the schoolbus pull up to the corner and watch the kids get on.

I want to offer some help. I’ll be honest. Many of these ideas are generated by AI. As you can imagine, using AI to help us reclaim our attention is a good thing. In some cases, these are exact quotes from the AI, Claude by Anthropic.

Goal: Reclaim some of your attention and your inbox. Why? Because your inbox is like one of the doors in your heouse. You have to make sure only the people you want get through that door*. You don’t want to let them in only to sell anxiety. You might be sympathetic to their cause, but you have to protect your attention, emotions, sleep, finances, and health. You don’t have unlimited amounts of any of those things.

Guarding the Gmail Door (many of these work in Outlook, too). I will list some examples, including those I disagree with. I will try to respect all political ideologies in ths area of my website.

• Search a term, then mass-delete. You might search for Trump, DEI, Donate now, or urgent. Select them all. Then delete them.
• Create filters for future emails. In Gmail: Settings -> See All Settings -> Filters -> Create a new filter. You can filter by keywords (Trumo or DEI), sender domain, or subject line and have them skip your inbox, auto-archive, or send straight to trash.
• Use the “Unsubscribe” linnk ruthlessly. Gmail even frequently provides an Unsubscribe button at the top of many marketing emails. One click, done.
• Create a label “Politics/Watch Later”. Then, filter those emails to that location if you really want to follow up. But, remember, they will stay around until you *Watch Later.

Attention is a finite resource. We can’t afford to squander it. By being more intentional in attention, we can better attend the the things that matter.