Summary of Stolen Focus
Recommendation rating:
.. Your difficulty in focusing is a systemic problem, one caused by our modern environment -work expects email, text, Teams response in X minutes, - social media feeds you hyperbolized news clip and people falling on ice at faster rates to keep that high going - big tech companies have designed an environment, socially and professionally, that worsens your attention. This is not a battle you can win through willpower. Author, Johann Hari, argues that you, average person, can make changes, but the whole system requires an overhaul… that sentiment is followed by what you can do as an individual in the meantime and leading up to the overhaul.
Intro
More info leads to quicker peaks and falls - as in our emotional reaction and attachment to a particular issue, crisis, joy. Empirical analysis shows shorter and shorter amounts of time spent on a topic or issue; the crisis of today doesn't last as long as it used to… we move on to the next one. Those cycles of moving on train our attention similarly.
A small study investigated how often an average American college student pays attention to a particular thing by eye tracking software. They discovered a student would switch task once every sixty-five seconds on average. The median amount of time they focused on any one thing was just nineteen seconds. Similar analyses in the 'adult professional' world showed .. three minutes.
Depth
Attention is a resource
Author and an interviewee speculate on how the creators of technology, like virtual reality and Mark Zuckerberg, create systems of manipulation. These people know that the technology is a Time sync but also a path toward capturing these people and monetizing them. YET… they don't let that technology take over their own attention spans and regulate their and their children's use (in general).
Three ways task switching degrades your focus:
Switching cost - You lose focus between tasks
Screw-up effect. When you switch tasks, errors creep in.
Creativity drain
The average office worker now spends 40 percent of their work time wrongly believing they are “multitasking”—which means they are incurring all these costs for their attention and focus. You and your sense of focus are simply the sum total of all the reinforcements you've experienced in your life
To reach flow:
(1) choose a single goal and mono task
(2) make sure that the goal is meaningful to you
(3) and that the pursuit of the gold pushes your abilities to the edge but does not exceed them
We're now living in a world dominated by technologies based on skinners vision of how the human mind works -- that you can train the creatures to crave arbitrary rewards.
Working against your focus:
1. The increased speed of information, and thereby filtering, and our innate feeling we should be hopping from thing to thing "to get things done" (*at work) and to be entertained we no longer have patience (show me 9 second Tik Toc clips)
2. Inability to get in a flow or Flow State
3. Mental and physical exhaustion
4. Loss of engaged reading (e.g., novels and fiction)
Sleep ..
When you do not get enough sleep the body thinks it's an emergency situation and responds physiologically in accordance with that, increasing blood pressure and heart rate, increasing desire for sugar and immediate food resources etc… (there is some counter evidence to this, circumstantially, in the Expectation Effect - Robson)
The less you sleep the less your brain encodes things into long-term memory ( read this three times and forgot each time)
Sleep allows cerebral spinal fluid channels to open and remove metabolic waste from your brain. 90% of Americans look at a glowing electronic device in the hour before bed. We are now exposed to 10X artificial light that people were exposed to just fifty years ago.
Reading..
Fewer people are reading and fewer still are reading fiction in an engaged way. So we skim things now looking for the facts or the Big blocks that move to an outcome, rather than dedicating our attention and thereby increasing our ability to focus and to think more deeply. Reading fiction has been shown to increase empathy and increase the reader's ability to read social cues and body language.
Empathy is vital to work and personal life - reading fiction is an enabler.
Food..
What you consume affects you in more ways than the waist band. Higher diet (nutrition) quality was associated in various studies with a higher attention capacity. Avoid sugary XYZs, garbage snacks, preservatives, etc… and emphasize whole foods, veggies, and shoot for Zinc, Iron, Magnesium, Omega-3..
Book quote:
"It’s not your fault you can’t focus. It’s by design. The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world’s attention burns."
Recommendations:
Life changes
Avoid task switching as much as possible
Don’t blame yourself when the distraction world catches ya - just get back on track
Stay off social media - as much as possible
Set some time to mind wander
Sleep
Eat well. Exercise. Reduces ADD and facilitates better clarity.
Do some free play
Disable notifications. Separate from device dependency.
Time block - e.g., pomodoro and/or calendar blocking and/or time vs focus planning
Get the book here
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