Optimizing for less attention

Across all the different sectors within the tech world, most companies optimize themselves, at least in part, around their ability to capture and hold an audience’s attention. This is especially true in social media. Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube—all of these services live or die by their ability to keep you looking at them so they can sell access to your eyeballs. The more time you spend there, the more money they make.

The same principle is often applied to B2B tools and internal company initiatives. We feel an urge to ask how often people are using something, how much time they're spending with it, whether usage is trending up. Then, we optimize to push those numbers higher. The assumption is that more time spent means more value delivered.

In many cases, though, we should actually be doing the opposite.

Sometimes the best tool for the job is the one that you only have open for ten seconds. To check my schedule for the week, I should be able to open an app, get the information I need at a glance, and then put my phone away and move on. To do my annual performance review, I should have a year’s worth of data and reference materials at my fingertips alongside a simple form that saves my draft responses, so I can go in and write up my self-assessment as things come to mind, in small chunks, then do a final review and submit it.

In both of these cases, the best tool for the job is the one that requires as little of my attention as possible, and metrics that seem positive can actually represent friction and waste. Instead of optimizing around time spent, optimize around density of value: how much someone got done in the time they spent, not just that they showed up.