Attention please, attention, yes you there at the back…
This book shares facts so crucial to human life that the mere act of not reading/listening to it is to bury one’s head in the sand like an ostrich attempting to hide from its predator. That is my opinion of the book Stolen Focus.
Attention and focus
Accomplished journalist Johann Hari writes this non-fiction story as a warning that our society is destined for cognitive degradation if we don’t shift our attention and focus habits. He places significant concern on the devastating effects of relentless social media and tech, explaining how the frequency at which we switch tasks throughout the day is more damaging than we realise.
Switching
Technology and social media burst into our lives with no etiquette manual, and this is an aspect that has bothered me my whole adult life. We gained BBM and WhatsApp, and suddenly we were expected to reply as soon as we receive a message. Just one small word, “Hi” is all it takes to stop what we were doing and switch tasks to reply.
This was not the case prior. When our instant messaging system was ring-fenced to SMS, we sent a message and only expected to receive a response when the person had free time in their day.
Scientific evidence
The volume of scientific research and evidence presented in this book is astounding. I think Hari knew that if he presented this book in a way that gave us a choice, we would ignore his concerns, so he went all-out on proving every single piece of the puzzle and its significance. There is a “we’re screwed” moment in every chapter.
Applicable to all
Whether you’re young, old, married or riding solo, parenting or not, this book pulls at the heart strings and doesn’t let go until the very last page. Even if you think you know about the Facebook algorithms and you’re in charge of your focus, this book highlights how little control we have in this realm.
Our lifestyle
With his no-holds-barred attitude, Hari grapples with our modern-day lifestyle. The nutritional value of our food, the amount of pollution in the air, the amount and quality of our sleep and the schooling system our children attend. It’s all counter-productive to our ability to focus.
“Most office workers never get an hour to themselves without being interrupted. The average CEO of a Fortune 500 company, for example, gets just twenty-eight uninterrupted minutes a day.” ― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus
The system
I really enjoyed how Hari manages to comfort readers by assuring us that it’s not all our fault. The system is plagued by an attitude of greed. On the other hand, he does encourage us to empower ourselves, shift our habits and take back some control before we sink further into the ditch.
With so much noise in our world today, distraction is not something society deals with occasionally, rather each day is made up of hundreds of micro struggles to pay attention to what matters.
‘If we want to do what matters in any domain – any context in life – we have to be able to give attention to the right things … If we can’t do that, it’s really hard to do anything.’ ― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus
He mentions that it’s not only about beating distraction, we need to replace the distractions with something we love doing that enables us to enter a state of flow and feel a sense of accomplishment.
Chunks of time
A few months ago, there was a post on LinkedIn about protecting chunks of time, the same concept of paying deep attention to what we are doing, and this resonated strongly with me. It seems there are occasional cries for help, but the system is so huge that those cries get drowned out by other louder sounds like the ringing sound of social media companies’ rising ROI or the pinging of another email or alert on our phones or another algorithm nagging for our attention.
Noise
In such a noisy world, how does one de-clutter their brain and focus? Well, there’s only one place to start, read or listen to the book and take it from there.
Since listening to the book I have:
- Set a limit on my social media usage to 30 minutes per day,
- Set downtime on my phone from 9pm to 5:45am,
- Changed my Ad preferences on Facebook (deleting all the suggested ads),
- Started using my bedside lamp in the evenings rather than main bedroom lights,
- Set an intention to put down my phone every time my kids talk to me,
- My email and social media notifications were already all off.
- I have never read or listened to the news nor had news apps on my phone.
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Deborah Aremband(http://www.Deborah.aremband.co.za)