Stolen Focus

By Engr. Carlos V. Cornejo

All over the world, our ability to pay attention is collapsing. In the US, college students now focus on one task for only 65 seconds, and office workers on average manage only three minutes. New York Times best-selling author Johann Hari went on an epic journey across the world to meet the leading scientists and experts investigating why this is happening to us and came up with this international best-seller published in 2022, “Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again.”

According to the author, this trending lack of focus is currently caused by two main culprits — the great acceleration and the great deprivation.

Great Acceleration

In 2013, a discussion in the top 50 trends on Twitter trended for 17.5 hours on average. Three years later, a top 50 discussion trended for just 11.9 hours on average. As exposure to information increases, we grow impatient and have less desire to go deep on a subject or tackle challenging work. Just think back to the last time you skimmed through a huge amount of information — going through a backlog of emails, catching up on group chats, browsing the news, reading a few Reddit posts, or scrolling through social media — did you feel calm, present, and willing to do deep work in the office, school or at home afterward? And how much information do you remember?

Because of the deluge of information competing to get our attention and due to overexposure to videos and images, the attention span of people worldwide has been decreasing, and they would skim and hardly read information that matters because they can’t wait to get back to TikTok videos and social media right away. Johann Hari says, “Our desire to absorb a tsunami of information without losing our ability to focus was like our desire to eat at McDonald’s every day and stay healthy — an impossible dream.”

The Gradual Deprivation

Over the last hundred years, the National Sleep Foundation estimates the average sleep per night has dropped 20% and continues to drop. In 2017, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings admitted that his company’s goal was to keep us watching shows and movies at night. He said, “We compete with sleep, and we’re winning.” Companies like Netflix, Facebook, and Google have long used armies of engineers to capture our attention and delay sleep. But today, companies are deploying advanced AI that has studied millions of hours of human behavior to optimize content and keep us up at night.

If we have a 6:00 a.m. wake-up time, we may assume going to bed at midnight instead of 10:30 p.m. is not a big deal. However, 80% of our REM sleep occurs in the final 20% of the seven to eight hours of sleep we need each night. During REM sleep, we process and organize information from the day. If we miss 80% of our REM sleep, we go into the next day feeling mentally full and unable to concentrate or easily absorb new information. Sleep researcher Matthew Walker has found that, “Ten days of six hours of sleep a night was all it took to become as impaired in performance as going without sleep for twenty-four hours straight.”

Solution

According to Johann Hari, the first step to counteract this malady is awareness. Be aware that rapidly skimming information breeds impatience which can spill over to your projects and relationships. Being aware of this will make us more likely to act. If we were a frog, it’s time we get out of that gradually boiling water we are subjected to.

The book offers many other remedies, and among them one that stands out is delaying checking your smartphone for an hour. In that one hour, try to reflect on these three questions: What matters most to me? What are my strengths and values? How can I be uniquely valuable to others? Then write down long-term objectives and think of weekly and daily goals that will get you to those objectives. Go deep on one daily goal until the 60-minute morning focus block ends. Or do some manual work instead but do it slowly and methodically. As Johann Hari says, “Slowness nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.”

But once your 60-minute delay is over, don’t go right away to your emails and social feeds but open your e-book reader app and read some paragraphs first for 10 minutes from a book of your choice. Developing a “book first” habit will condition deeper focus because books encourage us to consume information in a linear fashion and go progressively deeper on a subject, rather than manically skip from one thing to another. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied the “flow state” for decades and found that reading books was the most common way people experience flow.

Counteracting chronic sleep deprivation begins by assuming technology will keep you up at night unless you pre-commit to a good night’s sleep. For example, schedule an app-blocking program like Freedom to block all apps two hours before bedtime. Or make a family rule: “We turn off all devices at 8:00 p.m. and play games or read books.” You’ll feel like a hypocrite if you’re on a device after 8:00 p.m.

The author makes a strong parting warning and encouragement: “We have to decide now: Do we value attention and focus? Does being able to think deeply matter to us? Do we want it for our children? If we do, then we have to fight for it.” — Johann Hari