Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention & How To Regain Your Concentration?
We’ve all been there. You sit down, ready for work or school, and you get a text. As you’re texting back, a news alert appears – so you shift over to read what’s happening. But as you’re halfway through reading the headline, you get another ping: someone’s liked the photo that you posted last night. And after checking who it was, you realize they’ve also posted new photos, as you start swiping through the images, a Slack notification chimes. Wait, what were you doing again?
If you’re wondering what’s happened to your capacity for concentration, you’re not alone.
Johann Hari has noticed that the struggle to focus is becoming an increasing problem in the world. After recognising his own struggle to stick with a task, he set out to discover why he and the rest of the world are losing the ability to concentrate.
The book Stolen Focus outlines the deep-rooted societal and institutional issues that Hari found along the way.
Follow this New York Times best-selling author on his journey to reclaim focus and discover what lies at the root of this new epidemic. Hari explores the trouble with digital technology, modern work practices, and 21st-century parenting with an open mind and an even hand. Here are the key 3 summary points that are uncovered along the way.
Top 3 key lessons from the book:
Here are three lessons about our collective attention crisis, and what you can do to regain some of your stolen focus:
Our dwindling attention spans predate the internet, but their decline is accelerating at an alarming rate.
The internet isn’t the only thing eroding our focus, but it’s declining ever-faster, and that’s a problem. Out of personal dissatisfaction with his ability to focus, Danish professor Sune Lehmann conducted a study about attention. He concluded that, even before the internet, the rise and fall of popular books in the last 200 years indicates that trend cycles are getting shorter. The internet compounds this problem.
The culprit is the increasing rate at which we can spread information. From letters to the radio to telephones and live TV — the internet is just the tip of the iceberg. This “great acceleration,” as Robert Colvile calls it, lies at the heart of the problem. Where we used to consume the equivalent of about 40 newspapers each day in the 80s, it was about 174 newspapers in 2004, and it’s bound to be a lot more now.
The faster we can spread information, the more information we distribute, and the more rains down on every single one of us on any given day. Unlike the latest hot topic on Twitter, this trend isn’t going to go away any time soon, and our brains simply aren’t evolving fast enough to cope with it.
2. Most of today’s big social media platforms exploit your attention on purpose, so they can make money.
We have a saying in Germany: “The only thing that’s free in life is death — and even for that, you’ll have to pay with your life.” It means that everything comes at a price, even if the price is hidden at first.
Social media is a great example. We don’t pay with cash to use services like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, but in that word, “using,” already lies their true cost: our time and attention.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter – the fact that these apps and other online platforms suck so much of your time isn’t a design flaw. They’re supposed to be addictive. After all, there’s a reason Silicon Valley calls its customers “users.”
Infinitely scrolling feeds, vain buttons that issue dopamine at a tap via likes, shares, and comments, and algorithms feeding you outrageous stories to keep you “using” — it’s all designed to make you addicted on purpose.
3. The first step to regaining your focus is to stop celebrating multitasking and begin practising the state of flow.
How many things are you doing right at this second? More likely, you’re doing a range of things: listening to this chapter, cooking dinner, scrolling through the news, or chatting with your friend or partner.
Our focus is a resource that allows us to produce, to earn, to tick items off our to-do lists. And that’s where multitasking comes in. The more we can simultaneously achieve, the better our focus is spent. So why not distribute our attention across several tasks at once?
Ultimately, we just end up doing “performative multitasking” — we’re more concerned with looking and feeling busy than actually creating something meaningful. Since our society is now always chasing the next thing, we’ve adopted that same mindset at work or school. The more boxes we can check off, the better, or so we think.
So, what can you do? Reject multitasking. Set boundaries by tuning your notifications, and aim to single task.
Start small. Put the brakes on multitasking, go down fewer social media rabbit holes, and remind yourself that it’s okay to not know everything. Find some time to get into flow, and your power to focus will be back in no time!
The key takeaway of Stolen Focus is that humanity's loss of focus is a societal and systemic problem. While the individual can take steps to improve their personal focus, it is only a band-aid solution. Claim your attention. Increase the chances of winning the ongoing battle against the forces trying to steal your focus.
Also, if you’re struggling on having a will to study - here are some ways to overcome Procrastination!