Published on Healed Leadership, a LinkedIn Newsletter.
I’ve been thinking a lot about attention lately—how it flows, where it lands, and how it’s increasingly automated—and with the rise of AI, at a rate never seen before. After hours of writing and rewriting to explore this territory, what emerged for me was something I’m calling the Automation-Attention Paradox:
Automation-Attention Paradox: The counterintuitive phenomenon where increasing automation of tasks and processes, while designed to free up our attention and cognitive resources, instead diminishes our capacity for deep attention, discernment, and noticing. As we automate more aspects of work and life, we simultaneously reduce the regular practice of attention-related skills precisely when the complexity of our environment demands these skills more than ever.
For those hollering, “What rock have you been living under? Have you never heard of the Paradox of Automation or the Time-to-Automation Paradox or the Productivity Paradox!?” Bear with me. [1]
The Seduction of Automation
I deeply understand the seduction of automation and its value—I spent a large chunk of my career implementing it for others. There’s power in it—freeing us from mundane tasks for more powerful thinking and freeing our time to focus on what we love and what matters.
The risk lies in not using that freed time to continue building our noticing skills. We automate to gain space, then immediately fill that space with more inputs rather than strengthening our discernment.
I lost my first love to automation—photography. Photography is a practice of careful seeing, deliberate choices, and constraints that forced presence. Then digital paved the road for cloud syncing, and the practice that had taught me to truly notice the world drowned in a sea of “I’ll look at these later.” I had unwittingly adopted the practice of delaying my presence.
That personal loss got me wondering: as leaders increasingly automate our workflows, communications, and decision processes, what essential practices of noticing are we unwittingly surrendering? And what might the cost be to our organizations, our teams, and ourselves?
Examples appear everywhere. In finance, as subscription economies balloon transaction volumes, we’ve simultaneously automated financial systems. The average business owner now rarely engages with spending patterns until they sit down overwhelmed by months of automated transactions.
The Leadership Cost
What happens when we outsource our attention without strengthening our capacity to notice? The cost is profound: reactive decision-making, diminished creativity, shallow relationships, missed opportunities, and perhaps most concerning—a false sense of control while actually removing ourselves from the practice of discernment.
As leaders, our most valuable asset isn’t our ability to process volume—it’s our discernment, our presence, our capacity to notice what others miss.
Herein lies the Automation-Attention Paradox: just when we need our discernment and noticing muscles the most, we’re systematically training them out of our daily practice. Which led me to wonder: if automation’s premise is to create space, why must I be so intentional about creating space to practice attention?
The Automation Vacuum
Then it hit me! Automation doesn’t create space—it creates a vacuum. And nature abhors a vacuum. It fills rapidly with whatever is nearby—notifications, emails, updates, dings, rings—like space debris to a spaceship. What’s meant to create clarity attracts chaos.
It’s like that scene in Spaceballs where the massive vacuum sucks all the air from the planet’s atmosphere. Manual processes are the atmosphere holding our attention; when they disappear, we need a new atmosphere to prevent our attention from escaping.
Our Opportunity: Create a New Atmosphere
This is our opportunity. We wanted to eliminate the old atmosphere of “arbitrary” constraints for good reasons—so now we have to create a new one that doesn’t require every interaction to hold our attention and isn’t consumed by distractions. It’s challenging because it requires muscles we haven’t developed en masse. But, lucky for us, we can do hard things.
We’ll get good at this—really good—because we’ll bring the same intention and diligence to our attention that we bring to our strategic plans. This new leadership capacity—the ability to notice deeply in an age of automation—might be beyond anything we’ve previously known. Because it is. We’re developing skills for a world that’s never existed before. [2]
Rituals for Practicing Presence
How are you navigating this challenge? What rituals have you developed to stay present and focused in a world designed to automate your attention?
I’ve started interviewing leaders about their unconventional practices—those that fall outside the “5 AM club, cold plunge” narratives flooding our streams. If you have a practice you’d be willing to share, join my interview list. (And stay tuned for these interviews in future issues.)
Looking for inspiration? Check out my complementary publication: Unstruck Soundbites filled with bite-sized practices, including one inspired by this week’s Automation reflection.
What pitfalls and blindspots around automation and attention are we not talking about yet? Let us know in the comments.
Footnotes and Credits:
Photo: The International Space Station was orbiting on a northeast track 261 miles above the Pacific Ocean when this photograph captured the first rays of an orbital sunrise illuminating Earth’s atmosphere. NASA/Matthew Dominick
- In researching related concepts, I found several established paradoxes: The Time-to-Automation Paradox focuses on how automation initially requires more time investment before saving time. The Paradox of Automation (Lisanne Bainbridge) concerns how automatic systems still require human operators who have less practice when intervention is needed. The Productivity Paradox examines how increased IT investment doesn’t always show in productivity statistics. The Automation-Attention Paradox differs by focusing specifically on how automation affects our cognitive capacity for attention, discernment, and noticing—particularly crucial for leadership. ↩︎
- Mindfulness isn’t new, but the environments in which we need to practice and develop mindfulness are unprecedented. ↩︎
