The Bump Chronicles
On April 8th I spectacularly hit my head twice (if you know me I never do anything by halves) when I fainted in my bathroom. My head and a porcelain sink got very well acquainted. This resulted in a condition called Post-Concussion Syndrome and one heck of a damaged vestibular system and, an apparent fun ride in an ambulance, but I sadly don't remember that.
My speech, my cognitive processing power, my time on screens, my memory, my executive thinking, control of my moods, and my awareness got downgraded to dodgy dial-up internet compared to my usual super-fast fibre-optic speed. (This downgrade also came with an unlimited package of migraines and dismal medication).
Over a long, long, long and frustrating 9 months period, my life has been focused on recovery and rehabilitation. Don't fret, I am in a much better place and position I was 3 months and I am improving every week.
Since running on Windows 98 I have learnt a tremendous amount, not just only what the word ‘Vestibular’ means or the phrase or that bananas are not good for cognitive pain, but also a forced disconnect has given me a different perspective on this very plugged-in world. Some of these I thought useful to share over a few posts as I get back up to Window 10 (not XP, we never talk about XP).
Attention is a Precious Commodity
It took me two weeks to write this. Something I could have done on a bus on my phone while listening to a podcast, talking to a friend and thinking of what social media had been scheduled and what was in my fridge for dinner.
When you only have only a few hours of screen time a day you have to be super selective. When you have 40 minutes of slow writing before you get fatigued you have to choose your word carefully. Before, I was running at such a speed that I never I very rarely slowed down even when doing tasks like this. Moving too quickly pushing stuff out to even realize, as David Trott says “Shit travelling at the speed light, is still just shit.”
My attention has suddenly become very precious to me. I have filtered and organised my online life to allow me to focus on what and who I care about as I simply cannot just sit a sift and scroll through the tone of information on my feeds at the moment.
It has me thinking when marketing I never really, truly valued “attention” - I put way much value on output. Give them more images, more menus, more experiences, more content about us, us, us. When the focus should have always been on the customers and celebrating those who authentically and openly engaged with our brands.
What we do is we just tracked the likes, the followers and the impression and gave ourselves a pat on the back and continued pushing out content. As that’s what we value. When really we should have been taking that time thanking everyone for that like or follow personally, joining in the conversation in the comment section. Effectively and genuinely engaging with our customers, rather than jumping on the next thing.
Moving forward I am going to focus on how does our content and actions add value to the customer, not just kudos for us, because people’s attention is so so so precious. When people are choice rich and time-poor it is a commodity every business has to treasure.
Next event I am going to not stand there like a zombie recording everything stories. I am going to engage with the moment avoiding the siren call of ‘look at me’ and value the attention of everyone around the table.
I am going to value my attention. I am such a sucked for an advert, which is fucking dangerous stuff when you don't have much impulse control, I can lose hours scrolling through a Chefs Instagram and I can get so distracted from actual, real, present tasks by going down a rabbit hole of over excitement and pop up achieving fuck all or sending 100 emails rather than picking up the phone and nailing something.
I am listening to this to help me do that: https://www.nirandfar.com/indistractable/ .