[Music]
thank you already for your attention
your attention is the most important
gift you can give if we be really
attentive at work really focused on a
task we might call that form of
attention concentration if you’ve been
lucky enough to be in a relationship
where the other person has made you feel
like the center of their universe then
we might call that love and if you
haven’t already don’t worry it’ll come
all of you here now focused on the
wonderful speakers here today focused on
our red dots giving us your attention we
might call that presence attention is
the most fantastic gift you can give
some people say time’s your greatest
asset I prefer attention because it
forces you to ask the question how am I
going to spend that time and as human
beings when we focus our attention we
can achieve amazing things we can send
people to the moon we can progress
towards curing horrible diseases like
cancer and we can create technologies
that connect us with the some told
knowledge of the whole human race just
through a simple web search and we can
also create technologies that connects
us all together so you can speak to
anybody anytime around the world I think
there’s a problem brewing here and the
problem is paradoxically that same
technology I think is threatening our
ability to pay attention so the average
smartphone user touches their phone
something like twenty two thousand six
hundred times a day in about 150
different sessions because of the type
of audience you are you’ll probably a
bit above average as well so you’re
probably in the three thousand three and
a half thousand touching per day and all
of this is brand spanking new it’s come
about in the last five ten years or so
so what does that kind of look like in a
typical day well here’s kind of my diary
yeah here’s my sort of work diary
typical day I’ve set my alarm for 7:00
I’ll get up going up to breakfast
travel to work I’ll sort of spent the
first hour or so writing some strategy
paper because that’s when I’m you know
most tuned in it’s early in the morning
my
rains buzzing I’ll write some strategy I
might meet the boss in the cafe do some
other presentation like a TED talk get
get into that in the morning meet with
the team have some lunch to recharge and
refresh go off into the city and meet
some people come back again and finish
off with a bit of admin just to kind of
tidy up the day that’s sort of if you
look at my calendar that’s what my
workday kind of looks like typical
workday in reality if we’re not careful
it can look very different to this
though so quite often I’ll wake before
the alarm goes off and I’ll reach over
to check what time it is and of course
suddenly up there there’s a little
Facebook notification saying that I’ve
got a new message or a new share or a
new comment or so so I’ll have a quick
look at that and that will take me off
into six or twelve different things and
I might comment on a couple of things
then I think oh no I must you know the
alarm hasn’t gone off yet I’ll just pop
it back on the bedside table but before
I do I’ll just have another little swipe
down and refresh just to check again
before I doze off again for kind of 5-10
minutes then the alarm goes off and I’ll
reach for the alarm which of course is
my smartphone so the first thing I see
is more kind of notifications so I’ll
probably spend a little bit of time on
them and then I’ll go down to a
breakfast and have some travel but while
I’m at breakfast I’m kind of checking
again you’re not having a quick sneaky
look and doing some more updates and and
it’s interfering me rewriting my
strategy paper the notifications all
those naughty pings and dings and
vibrations in your pocket are
distracting you from your real kind of
work you’re deep creative tasks that you
have to do I’m going to meet the boss in
the cafe so I probably won’t check
Facebook then I’ll be a bit more
professional and having a quick look at
my linkedin and this kind of goes on
throughout the day this kind of goes on
and of course it’s not just Facebook is
it of course it’s not Facebook we’ve got
Twitter to deal with and then we’ve got
LinkedIn to deal with and we’ve got
email which kind of expands to fit the
remaining kind of available space and
you’ll see I’ve kind of left kind of 11
or 12 o’clock is a nice blank space but
just before we go to bed we’ll have
another little swipe just see what’s
happening out in the world that we’ve
missed and this isn’t the full picture
of course is it either this isn’t the
full picture this is what days look like
for people at the moment and of course
this bleeds into our personal life in
the evenings and suddenly our kind of
loving relationships start to look a bit
like two people connected to the rest of
the planet but not to each other
and after a while you know this whole
kind of thing just feels like it’s
crowding out the rest of life there was
a wonderful parody a few years ago I
don’t know if anybody saw this who’s
played farmville in the past so
farmville was a game on online game
about nine years ago it reached a
hundred million players worldwide it was
a Facebook game and it really started
was the first engine of this compulsion
to go back and click on things and touch
your phone and touch them and it was a
game and you you you you’ve bought
virtual crops and planted them in
virtual field seldom in virtual markets
or virtual money which used to buy more
virtual crops and pigs and sheep and
cows and grow them bigger and then sell
them and so on and so on and so on and
you could buy a virtual tractor for five
dollars which would enable you to do
that a lot faster and she’d go visit
friends farms but it was just this
compulsive tens of millions of young
boys were getting up in the morning and
being in time for school because they
were getting up to check their farm
first before they went to school I think
there’s one good thing came out of it
this guy developed this parody called
cow clicker and you just had an image of
a cow and what you had to do is every
six hours go back and click on the cow
and if you went back and clicked on the
cow you earned the right to click on the
cow again in six six hours time and you
could buy more clicks to click on your
cow by spending what he called mooney
virtual currency and mooney obviously
was a reference to the cow but it was
also a reference to Bill Mooney who was
the vice president of Zynga the company
that made farmville and this kind of
predated or a lot of these applications
that we use that we constantly kind of
get embarked at by our technology to
kind of respond to and I see this in
real life a lot a few years back I was
doing to work in the music industry and
you go to a rock concert now and half
the people there the production company
spent hundreds of thousands of pounds
creating this wonderful high fidelity
experience is incredible audio and the
lasers and the light show and the band
spent years rehearsing their stage craft
to give you this fantastic experience
and half the people are up there looking
it’s there and they’re looking up here
through this crappy little device
recording it with an awful sound quality
that they’re going to share for a whole
load of people who don’t really care
kind of weird to me it’s sort of showing
up for the concert but missing the gig
and I see exactly this at work where
constant interruptions you know people
say we supposed to be good at
multitasking
I wonder if multitasking is kind of
screwing up multiple things at the same
time I might be really bad at
multitasking of course because my age
because my gender because the wine
quantity I drink in the evenings or
because of Technology I’m going to blame
the last one I think technology is very
interruptive very destructive and
actually research shows that if you get
if you’re involved in a really creative
task that needs your attention and you
get distracted it takes you 25 minutes
to get back on task you imagine how what
that’s doing to your ability to be to be
creative and even worse that it’s worse
these constant interruptions knock
fifteen IQ points of your intelligence
it’s like losing a full night’s sleep
and perhaps even worse than that there’s
some evidence to suggest that it’s
physically damaging the area of our
brain that deals with emotional
intelligence how we relate with each
other and the rest of the world and
possibly these increases in depression
statistics work dissatisfaction are
maybe symptoms of some of this so I
think your attention is under threat
from these kind of crazy kind of
Facebook or not just Facebook but social
media updates your phone pinging there’s
new messages when you’re sitting there
with your partner in the evenings and of
course the year of the email so why is
this well let’s look back a little bit I
think the same reason we haven’t quite
sorted out how to use this technology
yet it’s the same reason why people get
scared the horror films so it’s weird
isn’t it we’ve had television for a long
time we shouldn’t be scared of anything
that comes on the TV we have to cope
we’ve had Coronation Street for 75 years
we ought to be used to anything yet I
know that big fake plastic white shark
isn’t gonna leap out of the screen and
Maul me but I still hide behind a pillow
or jump or check a glass of white oak
for my partner and why is that why I
mean it’s an interesting question right
why is it we’ve all got TVs in the house
we should be used to this by now so so
we explore this a bit let me leap back
in time a little bit we’re just going to
pop back are roughly 6 million years so
so on this screen here you’ve got six
million years worth of human history and
we’re in this bottom right hand block
here so 60,000 blocks on the screen each
one represents a hundred years of human
history and here we all are together in
this last one
human development if you like the
hominids development development started
six million years ago top left-hand
corner and time flows left to right down
to the bottom our relationship with
technology didn’t really begin until
about 3.4 million years ago early
evidence of hand tool use rough rocks
sharpened rocks and animal bones did
hiccup termites and roots that was
pretty much it in terms of technology
for at least another 1.6 1.8 million
years or so when we started creating our
own hand towards early hand axes and
carrying those with us to kind of you
know sort of do the same thing it’s also
the first time apparently that that we
sort of moved out of African continent
and about 700,000 years ago we started
to master fire so we could sit around in
circles like this and start to
communicate 400,000 years ago you know
we we discovered somehow to the
usefulness of shelters and all this time
brains are starting to grow bigger and
more complicated until we get to this
segment down here where we all are
modern modern human beings Homo sapiens
us 200,000 years ago emerging out of the
Great Rift Valley in what we now call
Ethiopia so let’s zoom in on that each
block now still represents a hundred
years 2,000 blocks on the screen for
much of that time as Homo sapiens we
were still wandering around the
continents foraging for food where we
found it 45,000 years ago first time we
kind of hit Europe and then in the last
fight last 10,000 years or so we
harnessed agriculture which means we
could grow food in places other than
where it was growing which led to
settlements and towns and eventually
cities in the in the sort of the last
kind of five thousand years if we zoom
in on those last two blocks the last
couple of hundred years last hundred
fifty years which this region’s
predominately responsible for the great
Industrial Revolution which really
formed the modern world that we’re all
kind of trying to get used to now
zooming in that final hundred years the
BBC broadcast its first experimental
broadcast 95 years ago like I say
Coronation Street popped out about 20
years later early internet in the 50s as
George Dyson the science historian
points out for the first five years of
the Internet it was about five kilobytes
big that’s about half the length of an
mp3 audio after links of a half a second
sorry of mp3 audio
so think about that and they were using
it to look at issues of nuclear fission
and and planets and planetary movements
and and explore human development so
when you’re 64 gigabyte smartphone isn’t
big enough anymore need to upgrade just
think about what those guys were doing
with five kilobytes back there and then
Tim berners-lee kind of gave us the
world wide web which is what most people
a bit of the internet that most people
call the Internet and most most people
use and then in this final slither 10
years ago smartphones hopped out of
popped onto the scene and that’s when
the firehose of interruption really
started just think about what you’ve
seen there 60,000 blocks representing 6
million years of human history we’ve
zoomed in on that last little segment in
the in the bottom of 200,000 years of
Homo Sapien development zoomed in on the
final block at that and this little
sliver has had such a massive impact on
us so suddenly that we haven’t got used
to it and I think that’s the same reason
why we jump when we see a shark on the
screen for most of human development if
a shark was swimming toward you it
really was swimming toward you if a
tiger was running toward you it really
was running towards you we haven’t got
used to television let alone the power
of this technology which is kind of
barking orders at us all the time this
sort of adult child relationship being
new notification must respond must
respond we haven’t quite developed the
mental approach I think to sort of to
sort of address the technology if we
want to focus on something really
meaningful and create if I just suggest
we can do simple things like turn off
those notifications focus on that one
thing that you want to focus on it’ll
all still be there you know it obviously
you can always go back in it’ll all
still be there so final thoughts are
kind of leave you with more blocks
before we were looking at each block is
a hundred years of human history each
block now is a hundred seconds eight
hundred sixty four blocks 86,400 seconds
that every one of you has in a day to do
something meaningful and useful and self
fulfilling with quite a chunk of those
blocks have already taken up by sleep of
course chunk more is taken up by um I
travel and by and by hygiene factors and
eating and my question is what are we
going to do with the rest of that time
the rest of our available time
are we gonna fill it with this and if
your answer is yes I like that
fine knock yourselves out but be aware
of it perhaps you want to carve out some
of your time by turning off those
notifications buying an old retro alarm
clock in your bedroom to wake you up in
the morning and leaving your phone
downstairs on charge perhaps you want to
carve out some of this time there’s some
deep creative thought uninterrupted time
to help think about some of the bigger
problems facing civilization to work in
an uninterrupted manner more closely
with your team well if you went to a
meeting at work and took a random
stranger in who knew nothing about what
you were talking about at work and kept
interrupting you all the time you’d be
fired when you oh you’d totally never be
invited to any more meetings which might
be a good outcome yeah we all do that
that person is your smartphone and
everybody takes one with them you might
spend it on more creative self
fulfilling pursues learning about
science learning a new art or you might
spend it to focus on relationships kind
of uninterrupted your smartphone will
continually call for your attention for
the foreseeable future
and all I want you to do I’ll invite you
to do is just question when that happens
do you want to give your attention to
that particular activity or would you
like to do something else instead and I
think that’s an idea worth spreading I
thank you again for your attention
[Applause]
thank you already for your attention
your attention is the most important
gift you can give if we be really
attentive at work really focused on a
task we might call that form of
attention concentration if you’ve been
lucky enough to be in a relationship
where the other person has made you feel
like the center of their universe then
we might call that love and if you
haven’t already don’t worry it’ll come
all of you here now focused on the
wonderful speakers here today focused on
our red dots giving us your attention we
might call that presence attention is
the most fantastic gift you can give
some people say time’s your greatest
asset I prefer attention because it
forces you to ask the question how am I
going to spend that time and as human
beings when we focus our attention we
can achieve amazing things we can send
people to the moon we can progress
towards curing horrible diseases like
cancer and we can create technologies
that connect us with the some told
knowledge of the whole human race just
through a simple web search and we can
also create technologies that connects
us all together so you can speak to
anybody anytime around the world I think
there’s a problem brewing here and the
problem is paradoxically that same
technology I think is threatening our
ability to pay attention so the average
smartphone user touches their phone
something like twenty two thousand six
hundred times a day in about 150
different sessions because of the type
of audience you are you’ll probably a
bit above average as well so you’re
probably in the three thousand three and
a half thousand touching per day and all
of this is brand spanking new it’s come
about in the last five ten years or so
so what does that kind of look like in a
typical day well here’s kind of my diary
yeah here’s my sort of work diary
typical day I’ve set my alarm for 7:00
I’ll get up going up to breakfast
travel to work I’ll sort of spent the
first hour or so writing some strategy
paper because that’s when I’m you know
most tuned in it’s early in the morning
my
rains buzzing I’ll write some strategy I
might meet the boss in the cafe do some
other presentation like a TED talk get
get into that in the morning meet with
the team have some lunch to recharge and
refresh go off into the city and meet
some people come back again and finish
off with a bit of admin just to kind of
tidy up the day that’s sort of if you
look at my calendar that’s what my
workday kind of looks like typical
workday in reality if we’re not careful
it can look very different to this
though so quite often I’ll wake before
the alarm goes off and I’ll reach over
to check what time it is and of course
suddenly up there there’s a little
Facebook notification saying that I’ve
got a new message or a new share or a
new comment or so so I’ll have a quick
look at that and that will take me off
into six or twelve different things and
I might comment on a couple of things
then I think oh no I must you know the
alarm hasn’t gone off yet I’ll just pop
it back on the bedside table but before
I do I’ll just have another little swipe
down and refresh just to check again
before I doze off again for kind of 5-10
minutes then the alarm goes off and I’ll
reach for the alarm which of course is
my smartphone so the first thing I see
is more kind of notifications so I’ll
probably spend a little bit of time on
them and then I’ll go down to a
breakfast and have some travel but while
I’m at breakfast I’m kind of checking
again you’re not having a quick sneaky
look and doing some more updates and and
it’s interfering me rewriting my
strategy paper the notifications all
those naughty pings and dings and
vibrations in your pocket are
distracting you from your real kind of
work you’re deep creative tasks that you
have to do I’m going to meet the boss in
the cafe so I probably won’t check
Facebook then I’ll be a bit more
professional and having a quick look at
my linkedin and this kind of goes on
throughout the day this kind of goes on
and of course it’s not just Facebook is
it of course it’s not Facebook we’ve got
Twitter to deal with and then we’ve got
LinkedIn to deal with and we’ve got
email which kind of expands to fit the
remaining kind of available space and
you’ll see I’ve kind of left kind of 11
or 12 o’clock is a nice blank space but
just before we go to bed we’ll have
another little swipe just see what’s
happening out in the world that we’ve
missed and this isn’t the full picture
of course is it either this isn’t the
full picture this is what days look like
for people at the moment and of course
this bleeds into our personal life in
the evenings and suddenly our kind of
loving relationships start to look a bit
like two people connected to the rest of
the planet but not to each other
and after a while you know this whole
kind of thing just feels like it’s
crowding out the rest of life there was
a wonderful parody a few years ago I
don’t know if anybody saw this who’s
played farmville in the past so
farmville was a game on online game
about nine years ago it reached a
hundred million players worldwide it was
a Facebook game and it really started
was the first engine of this compulsion
to go back and click on things and touch
your phone and touch them and it was a
game and you you you you’ve bought
virtual crops and planted them in
virtual field seldom in virtual markets
or virtual money which used to buy more
virtual crops and pigs and sheep and
cows and grow them bigger and then sell
them and so on and so on and so on and
you could buy a virtual tractor for five
dollars which would enable you to do
that a lot faster and she’d go visit
friends farms but it was just this
compulsive tens of millions of young
boys were getting up in the morning and
being in time for school because they
were getting up to check their farm
first before they went to school I think
there’s one good thing came out of it
this guy developed this parody called
cow clicker and you just had an image of
a cow and what you had to do is every
six hours go back and click on the cow
and if you went back and clicked on the
cow you earned the right to click on the
cow again in six six hours time and you
could buy more clicks to click on your
cow by spending what he called mooney
virtual currency and mooney obviously
was a reference to the cow but it was
also a reference to Bill Mooney who was
the vice president of Zynga the company
that made farmville and this kind of
predated or a lot of these applications
that we use that we constantly kind of
get embarked at by our technology to
kind of respond to and I see this in
real life a lot a few years back I was
doing to work in the music industry and
you go to a rock concert now and half
the people there the production company
spent hundreds of thousands of pounds
creating this wonderful high fidelity
experience is incredible audio and the
lasers and the light show and the band
spent years rehearsing their stage craft
to give you this fantastic experience
and half the people are up there looking
it’s there and they’re looking up here
through this crappy little device
recording it with an awful sound quality
that they’re going to share for a whole
load of people who don’t really care
kind of weird to me it’s sort of showing
up for the concert but missing the gig
and I see exactly this at work where
constant interruptions you know people
say we supposed to be good at
multitasking
I wonder if multitasking is kind of
screwing up multiple things at the same
time I might be really bad at
multitasking of course because my age
because my gender because the wine
quantity I drink in the evenings or
because of Technology I’m going to blame
the last one I think technology is very
interruptive very destructive and
actually research shows that if you get
if you’re involved in a really creative
task that needs your attention and you
get distracted it takes you 25 minutes
to get back on task you imagine how what
that’s doing to your ability to be to be
creative and even worse that it’s worse
these constant interruptions knock
fifteen IQ points of your intelligence
it’s like losing a full night’s sleep
and perhaps even worse than that there’s
some evidence to suggest that it’s
physically damaging the area of our
brain that deals with emotional
intelligence how we relate with each
other and the rest of the world and
possibly these increases in depression
statistics work dissatisfaction are
maybe symptoms of some of this so I
think your attention is under threat
from these kind of crazy kind of
Facebook or not just Facebook but social
media updates your phone pinging there’s
new messages when you’re sitting there
with your partner in the evenings and of
course the year of the email so why is
this well let’s look back a little bit I
think the same reason we haven’t quite
sorted out how to use this technology
yet it’s the same reason why people get
scared the horror films so it’s weird
isn’t it we’ve had television for a long
time we shouldn’t be scared of anything
that comes on the TV we have to cope
we’ve had Coronation Street for 75 years
we ought to be used to anything yet I
know that big fake plastic white shark
isn’t gonna leap out of the screen and
Maul me but I still hide behind a pillow
or jump or check a glass of white oak
for my partner and why is that why I
mean it’s an interesting question right
why is it we’ve all got TVs in the house
we should be used to this by now so so
we explore this a bit let me leap back
in time a little bit we’re just going to
pop back are roughly 6 million years so
so on this screen here you’ve got six
million years worth of human history and
we’re in this bottom right hand block
here so 60,000 blocks on the screen each
one represents a hundred years of human
history and here we all are together in
this last one
human development if you like the
hominids development development started
six million years ago top left-hand
corner and time flows left to right down
to the bottom our relationship with
technology didn’t really begin until
about 3.4 million years ago early
evidence of hand tool use rough rocks
sharpened rocks and animal bones did
hiccup termites and roots that was
pretty much it in terms of technology
for at least another 1.6 1.8 million
years or so when we started creating our
own hand towards early hand axes and
carrying those with us to kind of you
know sort of do the same thing it’s also
the first time apparently that that we
sort of moved out of African continent
and about 700,000 years ago we started
to master fire so we could sit around in
circles like this and start to
communicate 400,000 years ago you know
we we discovered somehow to the
usefulness of shelters and all this time
brains are starting to grow bigger and
more complicated until we get to this
segment down here where we all are
modern modern human beings Homo sapiens
us 200,000 years ago emerging out of the
Great Rift Valley in what we now call
Ethiopia so let’s zoom in on that each
block now still represents a hundred
years 2,000 blocks on the screen for
much of that time as Homo sapiens we
were still wandering around the
continents foraging for food where we
found it 45,000 years ago first time we
kind of hit Europe and then in the last
fight last 10,000 years or so we
harnessed agriculture which means we
could grow food in places other than
where it was growing which led to
settlements and towns and eventually
cities in the in the sort of the last
kind of five thousand years if we zoom
in on those last two blocks the last
couple of hundred years last hundred
fifty years which this region’s
predominately responsible for the great
Industrial Revolution which really
formed the modern world that we’re all
kind of trying to get used to now
zooming in that final hundred years the
BBC broadcast its first experimental
broadcast 95 years ago like I say
Coronation Street popped out about 20
years later early internet in the 50s as
George Dyson the science historian
points out for the first five years of
the Internet it was about five kilobytes
big that’s about half the length of an
mp3 audio after links of a half a second
sorry of mp3 audio
so think about that and they were using
it to look at issues of nuclear fission
and and planets and planetary movements
and and explore human development so
when you’re 64 gigabyte smartphone isn’t
big enough anymore need to upgrade just
think about what those guys were doing
with five kilobytes back there and then
Tim berners-lee kind of gave us the
world wide web which is what most people
a bit of the internet that most people
call the Internet and most most people
use and then in this final slither 10
years ago smartphones hopped out of
popped onto the scene and that’s when
the firehose of interruption really
started just think about what you’ve
seen there 60,000 blocks representing 6
million years of human history we’ve
zoomed in on that last little segment in
the in the bottom of 200,000 years of
Homo Sapien development zoomed in on the
final block at that and this little
sliver has had such a massive impact on
us so suddenly that we haven’t got used
to it and I think that’s the same reason
why we jump when we see a shark on the
screen for most of human development if
a shark was swimming toward you it
really was swimming toward you if a
tiger was running toward you it really
was running towards you we haven’t got
used to television let alone the power
of this technology which is kind of
barking orders at us all the time this
sort of adult child relationship being
new notification must respond must
respond we haven’t quite developed the
mental approach I think to sort of to
sort of address the technology if we
want to focus on something really
meaningful and create if I just suggest
we can do simple things like turn off
those notifications focus on that one
thing that you want to focus on it’ll
all still be there you know it obviously
you can always go back in it’ll all
still be there so final thoughts are
kind of leave you with more blocks
before we were looking at each block is
a hundred years of human history each
block now is a hundred seconds eight
hundred sixty four blocks 86,400 seconds
that every one of you has in a day to do
something meaningful and useful and self
fulfilling with quite a chunk of those
blocks have already taken up by sleep of
course chunk more is taken up by um I
travel and by and by hygiene factors and
eating and my question is what are we
going to do with the rest of that time
the rest of our available time
are we gonna fill it with this and if
your answer is yes I like that
fine knock yourselves out but be aware
of it perhaps you want to carve out some
of your time by turning off those
notifications buying an old retro alarm
clock in your bedroom to wake you up in
the morning and leaving your phone
downstairs on charge perhaps you want to
carve out some of this time there’s some
deep creative thought uninterrupted time
to help think about some of the bigger
problems facing civilization to work in
an uninterrupted manner more closely
with your team well if you went to a
meeting at work and took a random
stranger in who knew nothing about what
you were talking about at work and kept
interrupting you all the time you’d be
fired when you oh you’d totally never be
invited to any more meetings which might
be a good outcome yeah we all do that
that person is your smartphone and
everybody takes one with them you might
spend it on more creative self
fulfilling pursues learning about
science learning a new art or you might
spend it to focus on relationships kind
of uninterrupted your smartphone will
continually call for your attention for
the foreseeable future
and all I want you to do I’ll invite you
to do is just question when that happens
do you want to give your attention to
that particular activity or would you
like to do something else instead and I
think that’s an idea worth spreading I
thank you again for your attention
[Applause]
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