Douyin? quick worker? who stole your attention

01

During the Chinese New Year, I found that my usually chatty younger brother suddenly stopped harassing me and often stayed alone playing with his mobile phone.

Once, I curiously asked him: "Hey, have you become obsessed with playing games recently?"

Unexpectedly, he replied disdainfully: "I don't play games. Playing Douyin!”

“What’s so fun about Douyin? It’s all vulgar content, right?”

Who knew that my 12-year-old sister heard it? I immediately ran over and asked him what he was looking at and whether he followed the popular XXX. The two of them had a heated discussion... I was left alone and was too embarrassed to answer the question.

In order to have "the same language" as them, I also installed a Douyin App and followed some popular accounts under the guidance of my younger brother.

Hey, don’t say it, the content is quite interesting! There are trendy uncles showing off their outfits, little fairies teaching skin care, kitchen gods demonstrating cooking skills, diaosi counterattacking rich and handsome people, jokers telling jokes, grassroots entrepreneurs becoming heroes... Moreover, whatever you like to watch, it will recommend to you! Sweat, swish, swish~ Before I knew it, 2 hours passed in a flash.

After using Douyin for several days, the study plan has long been forgotten.

When I suddenly woke up, I was shocked. Douyin is really powerful! Without realizing it, my attention was harvested for a few days!

Douyin, launched in 2017, has exceeded 500 million monthly active users in just two years!

While this beautiful data continues to rise, it also means that the public’s time and attention have been quietly harvested.

In recent years, the word "attention" has continuously entered our field of vision. The information explosion in the digital age has increased the burden on our brains; the battle for attention from Internet giants has made us dazzled and overwhelmed.

Attention-harvesting tools similar to Douyin, as well as Huoshan Video, Kuaishou, Toutiao...

People often say that after a busy day, they can’t remember how busy they are. What happened?

Think about it, do you have the following symptoms:

Is it difficult to stay focused and always distracted when doing something?

Are you often anxious or fearful and find it difficult to calm down?

Have you made up your mind to work hard, but you can’t stick to it for long, so you just want to check Moments and scroll through Weibo?

Did you just want to check some information online, but you unknowingly got carried away by headline celebrity gossip?

…

If there are similar situations as above, it means you should be careful, your attention is being harvested.

Attention, also known as concentration, is a person’s ability to focus on a certain thing. It is the most important but overlooked scarce resource that everyone has, and time. Likewise, it is a non-renewable resource.

But do you know how long a person can concentrate and produce something in a day?

Probably only two or three hours!

With such precious attention, you use it every day to check Douyin, read gossip, check Weibo, and chat on QQ, allowing your most important resources to be lost in large quantities. Not to mention success, it is It’s hard to make any progress, right?

So, in today’s era of information explosion, how to effectively manage your attention?

In the book "Order", we are introduced to three methods:

This means to reduce the burden on the brain and use external tools to transfer part of the attention to the brain. outside. This method is actually very simple, and many people have been using it for a long time. For example, bosses ask their assistants to handle daily affairs, and celebrities ask their agents to arrange their schedules.

For most people, the most effective method is: making a list.

When you have to deal with many things in a day, memory alone is not only not enough, but also prone to mistakes. Make a list before doing it, and then deal with it one by one according to priority, and you will be in order.

The more complex things are dealt with, the more obvious the effectiveness of the checklist is. For example, when a pilot flies a plane or a surgeon performs an operation, there may be dozens or hundreds of steps in a complete set. At this time, an effective step list will not only greatly improve efficiency, but also minimize the error rate.

A good list must meet two key points: be concise and clear, and be constantly updated.

Regarding the specific benefits and methods of making lists, there is a book called "The List Revolution", which provides a systematic introduction.

We are all ordinary people. It is impossible to stay focused 24 hours a day. Therefore, after focusing on thinking for a period of time, it is important to allow yourself time to wander. It is important to take the initiative to wander.

For example, after working attentively for 2 hours, allow yourself to wander for 10 minutes, completely empty your mind, let yourself "wander" or be in a daze, and pull yourself back when the 10 minutes are up.

The author in the book also observed that planned mind wandering can actually help stimulate creativity.

Regarding this, I believe many people have also experienced it. For example: after thinking about a problem for a few days, I suddenly figured it out in the shower; an idea that I had been thinking about for a few days was suddenly inspired by watching a movie. .

This phenomenon is actually based on neuroscience: the right brain is closely related to creativity. It is responsible for associative thinking. When you are relaxed and distracted, your right brain is the most active. Can connect unrelated things.

Therefore, don’t force yourself to focus on one thing for a long time. Relax and zone out in a planned way, and you may get unexpected surprises!

The so-called knowledge literacy refers to the ability to find and judge knowledge.

When you encounter a problem, you don't need to have direct relevant knowledge, but you should know where to get the knowledge and how to apply it to the current problem.

Someone mentioned before that modern people need to improve their "search skills", which emphasizes that a person's ability to use various tools and materials to search for required knowledge is now a necessary skill.

For example, schools are paying more and more attention to open-book examinations, and there is less and less rote memorization of content; at work, faced with the same resources, different teams compete for a project and come up with different plans to bid. .

This shows that we do not need to study every knowledge in depth, but we must know how to look for clues to knowledge.

Just like facing a powerful search engine, you must at least know which keywords to enter!

In the Internet age, information is exploding and all kinds of knowledge are becoming more and more abundant. Even if we spend our entire lives, we will only master a drop in the ocean. However, if you have the correct way of thinking and doing things, , you can draw inferences from one instance, apply what you have learned, and remain invincible in the vast wave of information.

Finally, let me emphasize the three effective methods of managing attention introduced in this article:

1. Attention outsourcing

2. Active mind wandering

3. Train knowledge literacy

If you don’t want your time to be wasted or your attention to be harvested, start paying attention to your “attention” output from now on, and use scientific methods to effectively manage it.

Zhang Quanling once said: "When the times abandon you, you won't even say goodbye."

Very cruel and realistic, right? But the future will be faster and more brutal.

From now on, put your time and attention on yourself, cultivate yourself, improve yourself, and maybe you can get on the train of the times when it speeds by.