What Is New?
How newness disrupts focus and attention.
It’s time to rethink our relationship with new.
For many of us, our days have become centered around relentless calls for our attention, often arriving on someone else’s schedule, not our own. News alerts that get us riled up. Emails from a client. Slack notifications from a boss. Even text messages, once reserved for family and friends, now arrive as bill reminders and appointment notices.
For some people, this constant stream of newness is energizing. And if that’s you, I’m not here to stand in your way. But if you’re feeling overwhelmed, if your attention feels fragmented, your thinking rushed, or your days increasingly reactive, then it’s worth getting more precise about what this “newness” actually is, and why it has such a powerful effect on our minds.
There are two primary sources of newness that interfere with your ability to let your brain reset, recharge, and focus on the task at hand.
First are the endless new requests for your time and focus. Every new email, text message, or Slack/Asana/Teams alert is from someone who needs something from you, whether it’s a spouse who needs you to run an errand or a medical provider who needs a bill paid.
These are all incoming requests for your time. All new things for you to do.
You get in the car for a quiet drive with your family when you receive a notification on your phone; it’s most likely someone who needs you to do something for them.
And now your brain can’t stop thinking about this request until you’ve had time to act on it.
But why is it fair that your personal time should be hijacked simply because it was the right moment for someone else to make a request of your attention?
And not just your personal time, but your brain space. Instead of thinking about your kids in the car, who are excited to spend the afternoon with you, you’re thinking about getting back to your computer, finding the email with the bill, and making sure it gets paid.
It’s right that the medical care provider should want their bill paid, but it’s not right that your brain space is now occupied with something that is not urgent. Something that can wait.
Second, there is the newness that isn’t a direct request for your time, but instead provokes or inspires. Some inspiration, some of the time, is incredible. But inspiration all of the time, or at the wrong times, distracts you from what you had initially intended to do.
This newness often comes from an article, a social media post, a podcast, or cable news.
For me, it often comes from an online article. I’ll be sipping my morning cup of coffee, catching up on some of my favorite blogs, when I see an article that totally captures my imagination.
My brain starts racing. Yes, this author is on to something, I think. Maybe I do need to change my task management system. Perhaps I do need to find a different way to talk to my kids about food. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Or I’ll be listening to a podcast that sends my brain down the same rabbit holes.
And then whatever I planned on doing that morning goes out the window. I’m now all systems go on changing my life because this article or podcast has struck a chord, and I can’t stop thinking about it.
I had planned to work on a client project, but now my mind is racing, and I need to put a new plan into action. I have to share this article with my spouse, make a new meal plan for my kids, and plan to talk to them about the importance of protein.
The article was important. The advice was sound. I should put it into action.
But by reading the article during what should have been a quiet morning for reflection and being present, I let my morning and my day veer wildly off course.
It’s a marvel of modern times that we now have access to so much great advice (although some of it not so great) online, from all sorts of folks who have mastered this or that, but we need to be more intentional about when we digest and take in all of this great advice.
To recap, both the newness that inspires us and the newness that demands our attention have the same effect: they rob us of the essential time to focus, reset, or simply not think.
This is the third essay in a series I’m calling No New New, which encourages us to rethink how we engage with persistent demands for our attention.
Throughout these essays, I’ve tried to make visible what newness looks like in our daily lives. In the next essays, I’ll offer concrete, science-backed ways to limit newness and regain control of our days.
If you want to be alerted when I post these next few essays, please consider subscribing using the button below.
The full series of No New New essays can be found here and includes:
great post.