The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.
Arthur Conan Doyle
In recent years, I have been amazed at how much I have missed by not paying attention to things — many, many things — right before my eyes. Most of the hidden or missed meaning was pointed out by others rather than being a product of my own initiative or observation. For example, logos. Lots of them. Seen daily yet blurred over by the mind’s eye, which favors quick, default decisions and shortcuts. Take a moment to really study the logos of FedEx, Wendy’s, Hershey’s Kisses or Baskin-Robbins. Do an internet search for hidden or subliminal messages of logos. Look closely at the height of diamonds in a deck of playing cards. I learned to play poker and other card games around age 5, but never noticed the pattern in the card until it was pointed out to me at the tender age of 70. Bloomfield is a Pittsburgh neighborhood that I have frequented thousands of times over my lifetime. Last year, I was reading a history of Western Pennsylvania that noted that at the time of the Revolutionary War, it was a massive meadow of flowers. I mentioned my only-then spark of recognition to a friend of mine who looked at me with mocking eyes while slowly mouthing the words “bloom” and “field.” So, is it only me?
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Nah! Our brains are hardwired for efficiency, quick decisions, automatic responses and reactions (flight, fright, freeze, hide), honed by learning and experience. Minimal thinking leads us to Wendy’s with no more than a glance at the sign in our peripheral vision. No subtleties necessary. Fine, but what does this have to do with practicing law?
Details are the fundamental stock-in-trade of the business of lawyering. No lawyer is effective with only macro or strategic thinking. Logic and reasoning ultimately require the ability to flesh out details and to communicate minutiae to successfully solve a problem or to frame the theory of the case for resolution by a third-party or court. Lawyers navigate complex mazes, usually with at least one opposing counsel running interference to actively thwart plans A, B and whatever follows. Lawyers’ minds must always be agile — with wide-open eyes and ears. We must be diligent about paying attention.
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The Science of Attention
Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, is a researcher and leading expert on paying attention. She concludes that there are different types of attention, some that follow a personal rhythm. There are four common misconceptions of what it means to be engaged in concentrated thinking and tasks. The first is that people should always be focused and that they should feel guilty when their mind and actions stray. She concludes that it is not realistic to expect the mind or body to continuously run marathons of productivity. Breaks and rest are necessary to replenish resources. Each person, through trial and error, can determine how to maximize opportunities for his or her own peak performance. The second myth is that rote, mindless activities, such as phone/computer games like Candy Crush, are a waste of time. These activities, if used strategically, can help replenish overspent mental resources or enable fresh ideas to surface as we rely upon our automatic motor skills to physically respond to the game stimuli. A third myth is that electronic interruptions, such as email notifications, render us helpless to avoid distractions. Managing focus is individual and personal, with diverse ways to keep moving forward. Mark’s fourth contention is that regularly obtaining the state of flow when using technology is not easy; thus the ideal or goal should be lowered to a balance of different attentional modalities tailored to the deliverable at issue.
… [T]hat lovely poem that didn’t get written because someone knocked on the door.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Distraction
It is difficult for lawyers whose work has shifted over my four decades of practice from teamwork to being in the electronic silo of screen time. When I was younger, busy lawyers often had a paralegal and a secretary (now called an administrative assistant). They provided second opinions on the content and style of letters and legal documents. The lawyer then reviewed the document and thanked the staff for catching mistakes and making improvements. Now we wordsmith alone with spell check and Microsoft Word Editor guiding how we write and, perhaps unconsciously, even how we think. Briefs and important communications may be reviewed by a colleague or assistant, but my observation and speculation are that shorter communications such as emails and text messages are unicorns traveling from mind to fingers before romping through cyberspace at the speed of light to the end of the journey.
With the increased use of technology pushed by the pandemic, particularly remote meeting platforms, “work from anywhere” is the new norm despite, in my opinion, the encouraging trend of employers requiring or promoting more time at the office. As the venue for work changes, so does the individual management of attention span and our observational skills as we adapt to new work environments. Like most things, it is a mixture of the good, the bad and the ugly.
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