23.17 seconds
Reading is the most efficient way for me to consume content. As I've noted many times, among the seven forces, I have the shortest force-duration for reading. At the same time, we know the difference between a power lifter and a marathon runner. Power lifters are high force; short duration. Marathon runners titrate their force over a long duration. My Reader force is high for a short duration.
This afternoon, I put on a podcast to measure my force duration for listening. I chose Higher Learning, usually co-hosted with Van Lathan, Jr. and Rachel Lynn Lindsay. This recent one was Lathan hosting alone interviewing Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka. I chose it because I'm a regular listener to Higher Learning, find it engaging, and Mayor Baraka was unknown to me, and I wanted to correct that. This set me up for finding it a high-value, high-interest, and high-utility experience: the three of which lend support to our attention and energy.
Most of the time when I listen to a podcast, it's background conversation for when I'm doing rote work. Washing dishes, processing email, organizing and filing paper. It's the equivalent of working in a coffee shop where I get vicarious energy from the hum and buzz around me. This time, I decided to just sit and listen and to try to take in as much information as I could. The interview had much that was fresh to me, and was deeply informative. The entire interview was 58 minutes. I found myself struggling to hold my attention, in spite of the high-value, high-interest, and high-utility of the conversation. At 23 minutes; 17 seconds, my listener force was spent.
I put off finishing the podcast for a day, and, in the interim, decided on a different approach. For the next round of listening, I engaged a note-taking strategy developed in the mid-1950's by Cornell University professor of education, Walter Pauk. Pauk divided notebook paper into two columns, one for listening and capturing notes in real time; and the second column for notes taken later after review and reflection on the original note. Yes, this can be done now by your favorite machine-learning tool. The difference here is in drawing all the information into your ears, processing with your brain, pushing it out your fingers, then reprocessing from your notes and memory, and out your fingers again.
So far, I've just captured the first column.
I realized that while I stayed with the original focused listening for 23:17 before quitting. I had been drifting in and out of attention every 4 ½ minutes. I was able to refocus, but often lost some information during the drift out of attention.
This time, applying the focused listening strategy while capturing notes, I kept full and focused attention for the remaining 35 minutes of the podcast with no attention drift or loss of information. The experience was intense, but energizing. I realized had there been more of the podcast, I could have kept going. I hadn't hit my natural limit. Even though I was using more modalities with the addition of reading and writing to the listening, the multiple modalities had added force rather than having exhausted the existing force sooner. In addition, I have much more retention of the podcast's second 35 minutes than I have of the first 23.
My experience is consistent with numerous studies demonstrating the phenomenon of force addition from multi-model learning.
All of us have access to these forces. The strength and duration is idiosyncratic to each to us.
Running the experiments to measure yours is simple and straightforward. Let me know what you learn from it.
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper
REFERENCED IN THIS LETTER:
Higher Learning: https://www.theringer.com/podcasts/higher-learning-van-lathan-rachel-lindsay/2025/05/27/progressivism-and-poetry-with-newark-mayor-ras-baraka
note-taking strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Notes
notebook paper: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X5vuSm8piiUwnsoYlyTt28inijWNTBvj7-jGWTUSmSQ/edit?tab=t.0
studies: https://showcase.ems.psu.edu/node/70