Listening to Podcasts: A Low-Cost Practice for Your Attention

"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."

– Herbert Simon

When do I start to feel my attention scattering? When I'm bored.

I'm always bored. Whenever I have time off, I never really know what I'm doing.

I hold my phone and flip back and forth between Douyin, Bilibili, and WeChat. My fingertip keeps swiping, apps open and close, and time slips away without a sound.

But I always end up feeling bored. It feels like I did a lot, but when I think back, it feels like I did nothing at all.

Why? After thinking about it, I believe it's because my attention keeps getting snatched away.

Short videos, reading, WeChat messages, whatever it is, when I'm resting, my attention gets pulled back and forth by all kinds of outside things.

Whether you're reading a book or scrolling videos, whether the content is "good" or "bad" doesn't really matter. What matters is that once your attention has been interrupted over and over and pulled back and forth for years, it becomes extremely fragile. Maybe that's a kind of fatigue, but it's also where boredom comes from.

Attention may be the most important resource in the world today. Whoever has attention succeeds. And in a world where everyone is fighting for attention, how you manage your own attention is something worth thinking hard about and acting on.

A while ago I started facing this head-on. I think protecting your attention is simple: spend less time looking at your phone screen.

When I turn off my phone and go back to real life, there are actually very few things in it that pull my attention around by comparison.

I wondered: what could I do that keeps me off my screen, doesn't leave me bored or restless, and still lets me take in some information?

Recently I found a way: listening to podcasts.

It seems to work. Over the past few days, on my commute, I've put on my earbuds and listened to podcasts instead of looking at my screen. In that sense I've succeeded. It really has cut down my screen time.

And compared with all the apps on a phone, podcasts have shockingly low information density.

The whole experience feels like sitting in front of one or two people and watching them talk to themselves or to each other.

What's important is that I don't have to listen to them the whole time. When I hear something interesting, my mind drifts off into thought, and by the time I come back, a while has gone by.

My phone is probably the biggest enemy of my attention. Once I stop looking at it, most of my attention comes back.

As a simple way to win back your attention, listening to podcasts is really about building your ability to stay focused on one thing for a long time.

So when you feel stuck, just close your eyes and focus with your ears first. And when you open your eyes, use them as much as you can to face the concrete things in your life, like work, cooking, laundry, exercise, a walk, and so on.

In yesterday's post, I wrote about a simple way to get back a sense of control over your life. DC left a comment saying a friend had called this building a sense of order.

I replied: "Once you're in control, order comes back on its own."

I think attention works the same way. Order is usually built on managing yourself. When we can manage our lives and our attention, the sense of disorder in them naturally fades away.