Why attention should be listed as a competency in higher education

There is a Jataka tale about monkeys that were asked to water a king’s garden. Wanting to be efficient, they decide each sapling needs exactly as much water as the length of its root. So, they pull up every plant to measure it. The garden dies of good intentions.

I thought of those monkeys while watching a bright postgraduate student explain her study routine. She had four productivity apps, a Pomodoro timer, a colour-coded dashboard, two accountability WhatsApp groups, and a phone that buzzed nine times during our half-hour talk. She was uprooting her attention every few minutes to check whether it was growing.

The numbers are no longer anecdotal. EY’s annual media report found Indians spent 1.1 trillion hours on smartphones in 2024, about five hours a day per user, nearly 70% of it on social media, gaming and videos. Surveys place Indian teenagers above seven hours of daily screen exposure. A January 2026 study in the International Journal of Indian Psychology, surveying university students across disciplines, found that rising screen time had a significant effect on declining attention span, with students reporting greater difficulty concentrating and completing tasks without frequent breaks. A correlational study at a university, using the Digit Span Test, found the same association.

We have built an education system that assumes sustained attention while operating in an environment that systematically dismantles it. Which means the knowledge gap is not between what students know and what they should know. It is between what we ask of their attention and what we have built to support it. That gap has a policy name nobody uses. NEP 2020 asks for critical thinking, holistic development, and learning how to learn, but not one syllabus in Indian higher education lists attention as a competency. We examine what we never taught.

The wrong fix

We are a nation that loves exhortation. Our hierarchies, moral codes, and collective identity stories nudge us toward a familiar reflex: prescribe willpower. Concentrate harder. Wake at 4.00 am. Delete Instagram. Take a vow. A senior school principal in Bengaluru put it plainly: “We kept adding a new app for attendance, another for assignments, a parents’ group, a staff group. Nobody ever asked what we should stop. The teachers were exhausted, and none of it was because of teaching.”

Her instinct — that the problem is accumulation, not indiscipline — echoes with that of the cognitive psychologist Yousri Marzouki’s. Writing in Psyche in February 2026, he proposes ‘psychological minimalism’: the trouble is not a deficit of technique but an excess of cognitive noise. Rather than relying on constant self-regulation, clarity emerges when fewer demands compete for limited cognitive resources. Attention becomes less about moment-to-moment control and more about structural support. The distinction matters for institutions. Willpower is a private virtue; structure is a public good. If focus depends on individual grit, a university can only nag. If focus depends on design, a university can build it.

Audit before the vow

For students, the first step is reconnaissance, not renunciation. Relevant literature asks you to spend one day marking every attention leak: each phone glance, each tab-hop, each non-urgent ping and then identify the two or three highest-frequency, lowest-value inputs. Not all 20. Two or three.

This is where ‘Student Development Programmes’ should begin and usually don’t. Most “time management” modules hand out a template and a motivational quote. An audit produces personal data, and personal data persuades where exhortation cannot. A student who discovers she checked her lock screen 60 times before lunch has learned something no seminar could teach her.

A three-week arc any counselling unit could run: a tally sheet in week one, no interventions, just counting; three subtractions in week two, such as non-essential notifications off, social apps off the home screen and perhaps deletion of a few messages at two fixed windows; in week three a “Daily Card” naming one protected block, one first task, one boundary. Even ignored notifications impose a control cost. Latest research on attention residue suggests roughly 23 minutes to return to deep focus after a single interruption. For students preparing for NEET, JEE, CUET, CAT or UPSC, this is not wellness fluff. It is exam strategy.

An attentional environment

For faculty and those who teach, an uncomfortable question: how much of the distraction in our classrooms is manufactured by our own design choices? A slide with 42 words, three animations, and a stock photograph is not a teaching aid; it is a competing bid for attention. Marzouki’s point about clutter applies here too: each visible element competes for perceptual processing and invites unnecessary attentional decisions even when no action is taken. The lecture hall is a visual field, and most of ours are cluttered.

Given the same, a few solutions are: can we monotask the segment, i.e., one idea per 15-20 minutes, one visual, one question, and then a deliberate two-minute transition? The pause is not lost time; it clears attentional residue. Second, build friction, not resistance. A phone tray at the door works better than a lecture on discipline for the same reason that a speed breaker works better than a signboard. Third, teach with constraint. Ask for a 50-word abstract instead of a 500-word essay. Constraint reduces decision load while preserving meaning making. Good artists know this: a panel has borders, and the borders are why you look.

Worth saying plainly: attention is a teachable outcome. We assess it in every examination hall and teach it in none of them.

Attention as infrastructure

Now the part that heads of educational institutions, deans and IQAC coordinators will find least comfortable because it implicates calendars. Cancelling one recurring low-value meeting and protecting a daily focus block is, in a university, a governance decision rather than a personal one. Most institutions have a meeting culture that fragments the working day of exactly those people whose deep work, such as research, curriculum design, and mentoring, determines ranking in NIRF, QS and THE WUR along with a NAAC grade.

The solutions can be: First, meeting hygiene as policy, such as no agenda, no meeting. Thus, no recurring meeting survives two terms without justification. Alternatively, a protected institution-wide no-meetings window of a fortnight. This costs nothing and returns hours. A university that cannot say when its scholars think has not scheduled a calendar; it has scheduled an interruption.

Second, a procurement filter. Before the next portal or app: Is it essential? Is it durable? Will it simplify upkeep? Will it reduce attention load rather than add to it? Our campuses accumulate ERP modules and WhatsApp groups the way a household accumulates plastic containers and each one a login, a notification, a decision point, long after the original choice is forgotten. Every institution audits what it spends. None audits what it asks people to remember.

Third, a weekly reset. What helped, what crept back, one tweak. IQAC measures compliance; it could measure coherence. A “stopped doing log” is as valuable as an action-taken report, and considerably rarer.

Fourth, let us model it. If the Vice Chancellor’s office sends WhatsApp messages at 11.00 pm, no policy will save the institution. Culture is what leaders do on ordinary Tuesdays.

The Panchatantra’s Brahmin killed the mongoose that saved his child because he acted on the first thing he saw. The monkeys watered the garden to death because they measured what was easy to measure. We do something similar with attention such as counting hours logged, lectures delivered, portals launched, credits accumulated, while losing the capacity that makes any of it mean anything. The good news is that the fix is subtractive and subtraction is cheap. No budget line, no new committee.

Let us start with three things to reduce this attention issue: First, turn off 10 notifications. Pick the ones you never once acted on. Second, cancel one meeting such as the recurring one nobody defends. Watch what fails to collapse. Third, protect one hour. Same time daily, door shut, phone in another room.

The garden, it turns out, mostly needs to be left alone to grow.

Views expressed are personal

The writer is the Vice-Chancellor of RV University, Karnataka.

First published in The Hindu as part of THE KNOWLEDGE GAP column, 9 August 2026.