Cognition & care: pay attention!

Laetitia@Work #58

Hi everyone,

Last month I was invited to speak in Brussels at the World Employment Conference, whose theme this year was “Working in a digital age”. I thought long and hard about what I would say during my 25-minute keynote on the future of work and I came up with the importance of attention in our (digital) “attention economy” which, as the phrase does not suggest, means that there is no attention anywhere anymore. 

I can’t help but be a bit worried about the tsunami of AI (and human) generated content flooding the internet nowadays. Who can resist this tsunami? Can my own work pierce through it to grab other people’s attention? Can my capacity to pay attention to the work of others resist the tsunami? I’m in no way worried that the end of work is nigh but I’m sure the impact of this on the future of the creative class is huge (and has been for some time already).

Our digital age has brought about the “attention economy”, i.e. attention is what advertisers are seeking and selling. In this economy, attention is both increasingly rare and valuable. Like a lot of our planet’s most valuable resources, there isn’t much of it left available. Not only is there less and less human attention available out there, but its quality is plummeting too.

At work there’s less and less attention available, both when it comes to cognitive work where people struggle to concentrate and care work where workloads are increasing and there’s no time to pay attention to people. And our failure to address the shortage of attention is leading to many ills: work doesn’t work for too many people.

We need to learn to PAY ATTENTION. In cognition and care work, the value is in the attention given and paid.👇💡

Cognition: our ancient brains are not wired for this

Professor of neurology Adam Gazzaley coined the phrase cognition crisis. Our brains are fundamentally the same as the brains of our prehistoric ancestors. And these “ancient brains” of ours are simply not wired for the tech usage of today. We use multiple apps at the same time, work on multiple projects, juggle numerous constraints and loads simultaneously, check our phones hundreds of time every day, receive hundreds of emails… Yet we feel less and less productive.

A cognition crisis is not defined by a lack of information, knowledge or skills. We have done a fine job in accumulating those and passing them along across millennia. Rather, this a crisis at the core of what makes us human: the dynamic interplay between our brain and our environment — the ever-present cycle between how we perceive our surroundings, integrate this information, and act upon it. (Adam Gazzaley)

Our brains can’t handle all the stimuli. Nobody can multitask! This is taking a huge toll on our mental health. Many of our most pressing mental problems are related to this dearth of attention: addiction, stress, anxiety, burnout, depression…

Today, hundreds of millions of people around the world seek medical assistance for serious impairments in their cognition: major depressive disorder, anxiety, schizophrenia, autism, post-traumatic stress disorder, dyslexia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), addiction, dementia, and more. In the United States alone, depression affects 16.2 million adults, anxiety 18.7 million, and dementia 5.7 million — a number that is expected to nearly triple in the coming decades. (Adam Gazzaley)

When it comes to cognitive work, to come up with fresh ideas, put together well-prompted bricks of AI-generated text or code, make rational decisions… it’s all about the quality of your attention. Alas, most of today’s office work (even some of the work performed remotely) is still a productivity theatre that values busyness for the sake of busyness (meant to signal our worth to others).

Cognitive productivity isn’t linear the way industrial productivity can be when it’s dictated by machines on an assembly line. Whatever cognitive work will be left for us to perform will depend on our ability to pay attention. For that we will need to change our relation to time, to stop trying to multitask. It’s probably no coincidence if so many of the current work demands concern our relation to time: the 4-day workweek, the idea of core work hours, the desire for more autonomy at work…

Being able to pay attention at work isn’t just an individual issue, it’s a collective one. It’s about the way we use tech as a team, the way we work together, the collective rules we implement as well as the rituals and institutions we create to improve the attention we can pay and the quality of our work.

The current crisis of care is the result of our dearth of attention

Besides cognition, there’s another dimension that’s critical for the future of work: care. There’s the care work of actual care workers (nannies, nurses and the like) but also the care element involved in other types of work (office work included) that will be more and more important as more cognitive tasks are automated.

Care work is likely to be the number one source of jobs in the future. Already today there’s a shortage of millions of nurses, domestic workers, nannies, teachers and even doctors worldwide. With population ageing, increased isolation and exploding mental health issues, it’s safe to say the current shortage will only increase in the future.

👉 See also my previous newsletter: Desperate for more male nurses, teachers and cleaners. Laetitia@Work #57

When it comes to care, the value lies in the quality of the relationships we develop as service workers, and the trust that’s generated. And these depend on the attention we give and pay each other. There’s a multiplier effect in that relationship that’s not measured by our current productivity metrics (which focus on quantities of patients and procedures rather than quality of care and trust). We pretend service workers are interchangeable but they are not. Depending on how much attention a health worker can give a patient, the quality of health care varies greatly.

There has been a lot of burnout among healthcare workers. Take nurses. Of course they suffer from low pay (especially in times of inflation). But their primary complaint is the feeling of neglecting their patients, of not being able to give them the attention they need. Faced with untenable nurse-patients ratios, they say “We are not OK”. Also in the case of healthcare, the dearth of attention is literally killing people ⚰️

👉 Check this newsletter from long ago: Nurses in the spotlight. A bit of history. Laetitia@Work #17

I have written at length about the many limits of productivity. Care work shouldn’t be viewed as burdened with “low productivity”. It is in fact infrastructure because care work supports the productivity of all workers in all sectors. Without a nanny to care for your 2-year-old you can’t be a productive worker. If you have to take a day off to take a child to a faraway doctor because there’s no healthcare near you, that’s a loss of productivity too. When the strength of our care infrastructure decreases, everybody’s productivity decreases!

There’s some care in most of activities: there’s the emotional work of maintaining good office relations and the care work you devote to customers and employees, for example. There too, there’s a multiplier effect that’s been neglected for too long. We need to learn to value the attention (and the time) that this work requires.

Our individual and collective challenge will be to learn to pay attention again, put money in it and develop the ability to focus. It will involve redesigning jobs, reducing workloads, rethinking tasks and digital uses so we can all pay better attention, care for each other and improve our mental health.

🎥 Samuel Durand's documentary "Time to Work" (Work in Progress - Documentary) is now available for streaming on several platforms. To find out where to watch it, check this page.

💡Check out the last articles I wrote for Welcome to the Jungle:

• Savoir arrêter, plutôt que de persévérer dans l’erreur : la vraie clé du succès (in French)

• L'art de la négociation : la qualité sine qua non du « bon » leader ? (in French)

🎙️ The latest episode of Nouveau Départ is titled Le syndrome du wonderparent (with Anne Peymirat) 🎧 (in 🇫🇷)

Miscellaneous

🧩 Why Tetris Consumed Your Brain, Morgan Shaver, The New York Times, April 2023: “the psychologist Richard Haier found that regularly playing Tetris resulted in an increased thickness of the cerebral cortex (…) Tetris can affect the plasticity of cortical gray matter, potentially enhancing a person’s memory capacity and promoting motor and cognitive development.”

🧠 No Seriously, What is Intelligence?, Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study, April 2023: “For centuries science told us some version of this—that intelligence was something we were born with, that it was an intrinsic and unchanging part of our human individuality, that it came to us from our parents and ancestors, and that it determined what kind of life we would have, and in a sense, what kind of life we deserved. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, they all believed this.”

🇰🇷 The Real Reason South Koreans Aren’t Having Babies, The Atlantic, Anna Louie Sussman, March 2023: “Chang Kyung-sup, a sociologist at Seoul National University, coined the term ‘compressed modernity’ to describe South Korea’s combination of lightning-fast economic transformation and the slow, uneven evolution of social institutions such as the family. More and more women entered higher education (…) But educated women were still often expected to drop out of the workforce upon marriage or motherhood (…) Women’s ambitions have expanded, but the idea of what it means to be a wife and mother in Korea has not. As a result, resentments on both sides of the gender divide have flourished.”

What is your best remedy to the dearth of attention? You have all my attention 🤗