📚 Stolen Focus, Shrinking Attention Spans, and more.

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📚 Book Summary:

This week’s book is “Stolen Focus” by Johann Hari.

Our ability to focus and pay attention is collapsing. But why?

That’s the question Johann Hari attempts to answer in this book. After 3 years of research, Johann shares 14 causes that explain how our attention was stolen. This is a fantastic read that will make you more aware of where your attention went and how to get it back.

Here are 3 lessons from the book:

📖

1) How You Accidentally Trained Your Brain To Not Focus

Any task that you do repeatedly, you will get good at.

Unfortunately, most of us have gotten good at not focusing. Here’s how:

• The average person spends over 3 hours a day on their phone and touches their phone 2,617 times a day.

That’s about once every 33 seconds.

How can we expect our brains to focus on one thing for an extended period of time if we’re constantly reaching for our phones or shifting our attention to something else?

In one study, scientists put tracking software on the computers of American college students and found that they switched tasks once every 65 seconds.

Adults aren’t much better. A study by Professor Gloria Mark found that the average adult working in an office stays on one task for just 3 minutes.

Even if you do manage to get into a state of flow or deep work, it only takes one distraction to knock you off course.

A study from the University of Oregon found that if you are focusing on something and get interrupted, it will take about 23 minutes for you to get back to the same state of focus.

If you’re an office worker who has to respond to emails, Slack messages, or calls, it becomes nearly impossible to do any deep work.

We’re distracted by distractions and have accidentally trained our brains to expect something different every minute or so…

📖

2) Overcome Distraction By Limiting Yourself

One of the most effective tools you can use to overcome distraction is called "pre-commitment.”

It’s when you remove temptation or bind yourself to a decision so you can’t change your actions.

There’s a famous story about this in Homer’s Odyssey–one of the great works of literature.

In the story, the main character Ulysses is sailing home. But to do so, he has to sail through a part of the sea that is filled with Sirens—half-women and half-fish creatures who sing beautiful songs to lure men into the water, and then drown them.

Think of them as evil mermaids.

Before his ship nears the sirens, he orders his men to fill their ears with beeswax so that they couldn’t hear their songs.

Ulysses, however, wants to hear their infamous songs, so he came up with a genius plan. He orders his men to tie him to the mast with a rope and make sure he couldn’t move his hands or feet.

When the time came and Ulysses heard the sirens, no matter how much he struggled or how great his temptation to jump into the water got, he couldn’t free himself.

Johann recommends that we follow the same strategy when it comes to our devices.

For instance, he puts his phone in a kSafe (a timed lock box) so that he can’t access his phone for several hours in the morning, no matter how badly he wants to check it.

He also experimented with only using a Jitterbug phone. It’s a basic phone that doesn’t have email, social media, or any addictive apps.

He’s also encourages everyone to try a social media sabbatical, where you delete all social media and addictive apps for 3 months out of the year.

By removing these addictive technologies from your life, or at least locking them away, you, like Ulysses, won’t be able to fall into the grasp of distraction no matter how strong their temptation.

📖

3) The #1 Best Thing You Can Do For Your Focus

A study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard looked at the IQ of some of their workers in two situations.

At first, they tested their IQ when they were not being distracted or interrupted. Then they tested their IQ when they were receiving emails and calls.

The study found that “technological distractions” caused an average drop in IQ by 10 points!

To get a sense of how big an effect that is, that’s twice the impact on your IQ as smoking cannabis.

In a different study, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University took 136 students and got them to take a test. The group of students who had their phones on and received text messages during the test performed on average 20% worse.

The evidence is clear: your smartphone isn’t making you smarter, but dumber.

If you have to do important work, whether it’s at home or at the office, try to put your phone on silent and keep it away from you if possible.

You’ll have fewer distractions and less temptation to check it. And as a result, you’ll get your work done faster and better.

✅ Actionable Advice:

1) Stop task-switching. If you’re constantly switching tasks every minute, you’re training your brain to expect something new instead of training it to focus on one task for an extended period of time.

2) If you have a hard time with distractions, consider getting a kSafe, Jitterbug phone, or another device that limits your ability to access it (like the Freedom or Cold Turkey app).

3) If possible, put your phone on silent and leave it somewhere away from you to avoid getting distracted or tempted to check it.

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Thank you for your support,

Alex W.