If we stopped tracking our attention as time spent, and start treating it as a living connection between us and the outside world, could we create a mentally sustainable digital media environment?

Would you measure how much you enjoyed going to the beach by the minutes you were in the water? No? Then why do we keep using time spent as a success metric to track attention online? The evidence is there: optimizing for advertisers and maximizing time spent damages our mental and emotional well-being.

So I did what I usually do when I’m down: I started to draw. Which helped me understand what other aspects of our attentional capacities matter. My talk will introduce a new, visual model to observe, record and show how we focus. Using it hopefully will bring more flow into all of our lives, and inspire new, emotionally sustainable business models for our media environment.