New Name, Skill, & Commitment

Jun 26, 2023

We are excited to share with you the news that Focusable has been renamed and relaunched as Engageable. This relaunch also brings the next major leap forward in power, user simplicity and vibrancy for the tool.

It’s a change in name, but it’s most definitely not a change in intent. We have made the change based on the recent realization that the word focus was holding us back - preventing us from explaining our intent properly.

We think of Engageable as more than just a new name for a software tool. We believe it is also a name for a skill to develop in our students and ourselves in the age of AI. We’ve decided that we need to break the wheel of language and create a new word for something important.

The term engageable gets us past the shortcomings of existing terms we’ve been trying to work with, like focus. Our realization came after too many conversations where it was clear the word focus has a negative association in people’s minds. And also, it too often associated our use case with pure productivity or prioritization.

We’ve struggled with adopting other existing terms as the purpose of our tool as well - because we find them all to fail to explain something we think is important. The word engagement itself all too commonly speaks to the content or experience, and not the role of the individual to engage themselves. Curiosity (which we pursued some years ago with our tool Recap) presents almost an unattainable ideal in our hyper-stimulating world and is a challenge to teach reliably and broadly. Terms like attention span and cognitive endurance speak positively to the act we are encouraging, but fail to recognize the benefit of the act and thus justify the purpose of why it’s worth it.

The real issue is that all these terms fail to capture an important relationship between sustained attention and your interests. They don’t explain a critical point about what interests are - essentially, a biological reinforcement of attention. More specifically, interests make attention feel good. And they don’t explain the last point, which is that interests come from sustained attention. This is not to say that everyone can be interested in everything - that would be impossible. But it is true that you can find anything interesting if you sustain your attention.

The definition of engageability is thus the ability to pay attention before natural interest and to sustain it till that interest develops. It’s a skill that can be developed, like focus - even for those with attentional disabilities.

The insight for this is based upon research into mindsets as well as how interest forms for products, music, etc. But especially, it is based on our work supporting tens of thousands of schools with the Swivl product. Yes, you may not have known this, but we’ve always been a small team working within Swivl. And the insights that came from supporting teachers with video, and in particular, our work training classroom management skills. Where we’ve been given permission, we’ve seen thousands and thousands of videos. We’ve helped implement rubrics to evaluate classroom management and systems across hundreds and hundreds of schools. This is a view few people outside of education get. It’s honestly a view few people inside education get.

And what we’ve learned from it is that great teaching creates more than just engagement. It teaches the ability to engage. This is why great teachers, and especially teachers with great classroom management skills, outperform classrooms with the latest and greatest technology. There’s no amount of digital personalization that can compete with a teacher that knows how to teach their students how to engage themselves.

Many consider the experience of paying attention without interest to be negative. Certainly it can be a negative feeling when we’re overstimulated from other technology experiences. And when we’ve only ever been engaged by something entertaining, and never learned to generate our own interests, it can feel very negative. But let’s put this another way. Attention without interest IS mindfulness - just mindfulness in action. It is attention without attachment to feelings, which is precisely what mindfulness is. And mindfulness is a good thing for us - especially when it is applied within range of your abilities to do so.

We believe it is an essential human experience that we need to not only nurture, but also to start to create more positive meaning about.

And like we’ve been saying from the start of this venture, we think what we’re working on (regardless of name) is of particular importance with the arrival of AI. The world is already distracting, and we don’t think that is going away. And the challenge of engaging yourself deeply in learning or an activity gets even harder with the presence of the “button”. AI makes any cognitive task that used to take work and puts it an impulse away. We no longer have to think, just click. And while this can do amazing things when leveraged in constructive ways, it’s also a constant and ever present pull towards mindlessness. And we really need a balance of mindfulness and mindlessness to be healthy and thrive.

This Engageable launch represents more than a name change. It’s the next major step forward for the experience. We used to describe it as a mashup of mindfulness and productivity tools. But more specifically, it’s a mashup of mindfulness and classroom management practices - now that you understand our source of inspiration is great teachers.

We’ve sharpened the experience on helping you better manage your attention through the transitions and challenges in your life. These are the times you really need a mindful approach to managing attention. After all, what else is a transition but the need to pay attention before you have a natural reinforcement of interest? What is a challenge if not something that you haven’t found sufficient interest to be motivating yet?

Click the bright pulse to get started, take a deep breath and follow our prompts to constructively challenge your attention in short intervals - tracking the ensuing time spent by activity. Tracking helps you build awareness of your attention and tunes you into how you are developing interest in the life in front of you. Then we provide the same options to recharge with short mindful activities whenever you need it to manage the stress or anxiety of attention, or to record your actions and reflections on how your interest is developing when it makes sense.

Engageable is not only great for helping individual students learn how to engage with their objectives or for managing your whole class. But it’s also just as helpful for teachers and parents to engage with their work and home lives. Which is especially critical for parents and teachers for young kids, where role modeling is the most important way they will learn good attention. In fact, the latter are some of our favorite applications - morning routines, time spent playing with my son and helping him develop new skills. Engageable is also still free to use.

We’ve added one more thing - an Engageable score. The score gets calculated based on the regularity of sustained attention and your self regulation routines. We believe these are indicators of your ability to engage, objectively speaking. As educators often say, measure what matters. And this is just the beginning of what measuring this important skill looks like. We look forward to partnering with the educators and parents in our community to get this measurement right.

If we can get this measurement right, it could be the start of something bigger - a positive transformation of our system of education. The perception of our system of education is in a rough place right now. People don’t feel good about it and you can see signs of this everywhere. And a lot of this is honestly due to how attention is currently being managed. We think the potential positive meaning of engageability - and in particular, a method to measure it and guide reforms by it - has the potential to change this. Certainly it can help rationalize the growing ADHD crisis, if not even help make gains on it by rationalizing our approaches.

Lastly, we think of engageability as more than even a name or a skill. We also think of it like a commitment. A commitment to living your life with present moment awareness. Committing to being engageable can help you do that. To symbolize this, we’ve created the Engageable ring. Rings symbolize commitment already - and we want you to wear this ring to symbolize this specific commitment. We are distributing them at ISTE this week (Booth 904) to conference attendees to get this started.

Not going to ISTE but want to get your Engageable ring? Just let us know and we’ll send you one.

As always, thanks for your attention and we hope you’ll give our latest experience a fresh try.

Engageable newsletter to explain the rename/relaunch

Subject: A New Name and A Sharpened Experience

We’ve sharpened the experience towards helping you better manage your attention through the transitions and challenges in your life. These are the times you really need a mindful approach to managing attention.

As always, thanks for your attention and we hope you’ll give our latest experience a fresh try.

Now you can follow us at:

Twitter: @getengageable

Instagram: @getengageable

YouTube: @getengageable

New Name, Skill, & Commitment

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