A topic I feel really close to lately.

Summer’s full on, it’s hot AF, you’re home just chilling, you pick your phone up, get on Instagram and boom…

…10 minutes later you find yourself still doom-scrolling your way through a myriad of junk content.

Been there, done that.

But I’m conscious of it and it’s rare.

I’ve always been of the opinion that you should try as much as possible to be a producer, rather than a consumer.

Not so you can put out even more content.

But at least just so you’re not constantly engulfed in consuming it.

If anything, getting into a producer’s mindset helps you think of interesting ways to live your life, because you know you’ll be sharing it.

So should you hate on how addictive social media has become?

I don’t think so.

It’s just the next evolution in our overwhelmingly techy world.

Nothing to hate, everything to learn.

Yes, you can learn more about people and the way they interact with content. In the way they get persuaded by it.

It’s a false myth that our attention spans are constantly shrinking. Our attention is simply becoming sharper because of the insane amount of information we have to process.

Mark Manson said it well in a recent article:

“Ultimately, nobody can manage our attention but ourselves. We can get mad at Netflix or Spotify or the Senate. But ultimately, these systems are loose reflections of our own attention habits shining back at us. Change our attention, change the systems. There’s an old saying that people “vote with their feet.” Well, today you need to vote with your eyeballs and mouse clicks.”

People are getting better and more selective at voting with their eyes and clicks.

What does this mean for us business owners?

We have to get better at conveying the right information, faster.

It all starts in the first milliseconds of someone landing on your site. That’s enough for them to form an impression. Trustworthy or not? Matching what I was looking for or not?

The branding and the messaging we use are the only things we can control.

No use in hating on this attention craze.

You have to be a bit stoic when it comes to it I think.

Do what you can with what you’ve got and can control.

Do it well enough and you’ll be taking advantage of the situation, instead of just being on the sidelines complaining.

I help my clients make sense of and get more control over this rather messy, attention-starved world.

If you need help, get in touch.