Nothing shapes our world as much as what we pay attention to. It determines our relationship with the raw materials we work with, whether the grain in a piece of wood, what we read, who we listen to, or our inner voice. The old GIPGO acronym still works - Garbage In, Process, Garbage Out.
I was reminded of it this morning as Farming Today clicked on at 5:45 ( I still find it the the best programme of the day in an increasingly anodyne and nervous BBC) to be followed by the Today programme. What stood out amongst the stream of self-justifying politicians and bankers explaining how hard they had to work to increase the interest rate spread that brought them record profits funded by savers was the steadily increasing tempo of mobile phone incoming message “pings”. I wondered what impact they had on the presenter's attention, what information they brought, how he processed it, and above all, what difference they made. Was it signal or noise?
Then, as the routines involved in starting the day kicked in, I asked myself why I was listening to it and what effect it was having on my approach to my work. The answer, of course, is habit, and habit is seductive, like automatic gearboxes and satnavs. Whereas the Today programme used to be quite combative and rigorous, somewhere along the way it has become quite passive and compliant, with little of the acerbic input of past presenters. It is now a roughly twenty-minute “rinse and repeat” of the same news interspersed with low-friction speakers. The time between 06:00 and 09:00 is largely a nine-cycle repeat. After the first cycle, the return on attention falls rapidly to zero; it’s just noise. Space asking to be filled with something with more substance, and so my own response has been to push the “off” button after Farming Today, delete the BBC news app, and instead spend thirty minutes scanning the news in the Guardian, Prospect and Economist, and extending my journaling time from fifteen minutes to thirty. Bingo, two hours regained.
The question; what to do with it? Resist the temptation to work yet - that just increases processing time, not input that creates the friction that attention craves. Reading, or listening to articles selected from the morning scan is part of it. Podcasts another ( I really like The Rest is Politics, and it’s associated “Leading” (the interview with Anthony Scaramucci was an ample source of constructive friction), The Knowledge Project, and am experimenting with others. Work still starts at 09:00, and I’m enjoying finding more nutritious fare than the fast food the BBC seems to have become in the morning.
Then there is the bigger challenge; applying the same criteria to output - and paying attention to producing more frictional signal than lubricant noise. There is an image I hold from Peter Korn’s wonderful “Why We Make Things and Why It Matters”; it relates to a piece of wood he was turning into a chair spindle, which was signalling that it was not what it was destined to be. He sensed it and used another piece of wood. I think all of our work is like that, and developing the sense not just to use force to push it through, because that’s what we’ve been asked for, is important for the artisan, whatever we do. We live in a world of process, but process and algorithmic approaches eventually reduce all output to an acceptable average, with the frictional quotient of graphite.
If we’re not creating friction, we’re accepting what currently is, which makes us either complacent, or passive.
These are not words I associate with artisans.