Hack The Box

Attention

It can be said that attention is the perception of a specific topic with a higher level of interest in order to gather specific data and information from it.

Our attention changes with our experience and the information we gain from the content and its clarity.

Attention is influenced by your interests, needs, personal attitudes, beliefs, orientations, goals, and experiences.

We have already approached this module with a confident attitude, expectation, orientation, and goal. Attention is an independent mental process that takes place subconsciously.

So when we talk about concentration, we mean the maintenance of our attention on a specific topic. This means that as long as we are interested in a given topic, we keep working on it until we have achieved the desired result for our well-being. Again, attention goes hand in hand with concentration and focus.

We will already know that our attention will begin to decrease at some point, and we will no longer be able to absorb information effectively. We are getting stuck at this point, forcing ourselves to keep trying, and learning ends up with problems of understanding and, therefore, with higher frustration.

Information security is a vast subject, as we have already discussed. We will not be able to absorb all the information at once. We will often come back to topics and repeat what we are missing. This is a normal process. We must understand how to divide our attention.

There is no general formula that we can use to learn how to divide our attention correctly. This is an individual process that cannot be categorized yet without diving too deep into psychology studies. There are far too many personal characteristics and experiences of each individual to be taken into account.

We know that attention takes place at the moment and therefore has a limited duration to maintain it. It will be a great advantage to find out how long our emotional state and our attention span lasts the longest.

We can document it, and after one week, we will be able to see an interesting pattern. If we want to approach this on a more scientific level, we can add the following points to our documentation to get a better insight into it:

  • current emotional state (calm, nervous, worried, happy, depressed, relaxed, etc.)
  • the previous flow of the day so far (also with one word)
  • place of work
  • working hours
  • duration
  • sleep
  • inserted breaks
  • duration of the breaks
  • and anything else we can think of.

These are phases for which we must invest at least one hour of our attention. Make it fun, and we will surprise ourselves with the discoveries that we make. We can create a simple list or even a table for us to document this quickly and easily. We do not have to document it every time we start something, but we could relate it to the current module/course/path.

Once we know how our attention span is behaving, we will also get an idea of how we can split it up. However, this does not mean that if we have an attention span of 60 minutes, we can divide it between 3 other topics of 20 minutes each. Remember that the amount of attention we can devote to a particular topic depends on too many factors.

Experiment with this. Change our place of work, working hours, duration of work if possible. Listen to different music and try out different things that might help us.

It would be best if we did not force ourselves to focus on a specific topic because it will have a negative effect and, as mentioned before, can end up in frustration, which we will discuss in another section.

Make sure that you feel comfortable and ready to learn new things.