Two hours into the migration plan
you hit the wall.
Words started sliding.
You read the same paragraph
three times.
So you took a break.
Ten minutes.
Phone,
news,
a thread about a framework
you do not use,
a video someone sent.
Then back to the plan.
And the paragraph
was still sliding.
You had stopped working.
Your attention
had not stopped.
The kind of attention
you spend on a migration plan
is the effortful kind.
You point it.
You hold it there.
You keep pushing away
everything else.
A feed asks for exactly that.
Pick this headline,
skip that one,
decide,
decide,
decide.
It is lighter work.
It is still work
for the same muscle.
In 2008
Marc Berman, John Jonides and Stephen Kaplan
tired people out
with a memory task,
reading strings of digits
and repeating them backwards.
Then half of them
walked for about an hour
through an arboretum in Ann Arbor,
and half
walked through the busy streets downtown.
Back in the lab
they took the test again.
A week later
they swapped routes.
After the walk among the trees,
scores improved clearly.
After the walk through traffic,
signs,
crossings,
far less.
In a second study
even looking at photographs of nature
helped more
than photographs of streets.
The idea behind it
is called attention restoration.
Some places pull at you
gently,
leaves,
water,
clouds,
without asking you to decide anything,
and the effortful kind of attention
gets to put its weight down.
A street,
a feed,
an inbox,
keep it working.
So take the break
away from anything
that asks you to choose.
Walk,
outside if you can,
past something green.
Look out of a window
at something that moves slowly.
Leave the phone
where it is.
Ten minutes of that
is worth more
than ten minutes of switching
to a smaller screen.
And when you come back,
notice the paragraph.
If it is still sliding,
the break
was just more of the same.
A rest
is not a change of screen.
It is a change of demand.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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