Attention spans vs Consideration span

🧠, 🧀 & 🍕 – A metaphor:

All the talk around the town is about how attention spans are decreasing. But is there a deeper problem? Are we missing something?

Here’s my view:

What we perceive to be a shorter attention span, is in reality a by-product of shorter ‘consideration’ spans.

👉 Attention span is the sum total of many consideration spans. Now, what is a consideration span?

👉 Consideration span is the time period when a cold war is taking place inside your brain. Literally and unconsciously.

“Should I keep watching this? Why? What if the next reel is more interesting?”

Because the next dopamine hit is just a swipe away.

For some reason, many try to solve this problem by creating ‘short’ content. I don’t think this works effectively in all cases. More so because it is a solution for the symptom, not the root cause.

There is an audience that is ready to spend 4 hours watching a podcast. There is also an audience that spends hours if not days to complete a Netflix Series. And surprisingly, these are the same people who complain about being addicted to reels and having shorter attention spans.

So what is the solution?

Let us take the help of cheese-burst pizzas:

Some years ago, there was cut-throat competition in the pizza industry. Too many pizza companies and too many pizzas to choose from. A crisis not only for the companies but also for pizza lovers.

One day, some genius realizes that people love the cheese on the pizza, even more than the pizza itself. What does he do?  He invents the cheese-burst pizza.

The pizza size remains the same. The number of slices remains the same. But for every pizza slice, you essentially double what people like, the cheese 🧀

How is this related to the problem of attention spans we were discussing before?

Think about this: What influences the length of the consideration span? What makes people stay with the content? Well, it is the hooks (the cheese). It is the anticipation of something more interesting coming up. The dopamine hit.

So to deal with this problem of shorter consideration spans, we essentially need to increase the density of hooks within the content. Note carefully: The ‘density’ of hooks.

Consider video content:

👉10 years ago, one hook every ten minutes would have been enough.

👉 5 years ago, two hooks every ten minutes might have done.

Now perhaps, you need 3-4 hooks every 10 minutes. Or even more.

So as you see, simply decreasing the length of the content is a very surface-level solution to a deeper problem.

Sure, short content has its time and place. So does long-form content. It is not going to disappear as many people suggest. It is just a matter of increasing the density of hooks…