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 noticeStolen Focus explains why our attention spans have been dwindling for decades, how technology accelerates this worrying trend, and what we can do to reclaim our focus and thus our capacity to live meaningful lives.

Here are three lessons about our collective attention crisis, and what you can do to regain your stolen focus:

Stolen Focus by The Internet

The internet isn’t the only thing eroding our focus, but it’s declining ever faster, and that’s a problem. Our dwindling attention spans predate the internet, but their decline is accelerating at an alarming rate.

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. Between 2013 and 2016, the average duration for which topics trend on Twitter reduced by over 30%, from over 17 to just over 11 hours.

Reality Check 1

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.

Stolen Focus by the Social Media

Most of today’s big social media platforms exploit your attention on purpose so they can make money. Current social media platforms are designed to make you addicted so they can make a profit.

“There are no free lunches” It means that everything comes at a price, even if the price is hidden at first.

Social media is a great example. The YouTube videos span from 596 hours of meditative music to 36 hours of online gaming tone and a half hours of leadership chats and lessons and can be as short as 15 sec or less. Surprisingly, people leave the short in the middle and move on to the next. A goldfish has an attention time of 9 seconds, and Homan beings have an attention span of 8.25 seconds in 2023. Snapchat is created to deal with one-second snaps and is designed to have  6 6-second videos.  Thus if you wish to have a 60-second video, you need to have 10 videos of 6 sec each. That’s how much our attention has been fragmented.   

Reality Check 2

I asked many people of all ages, why people keep scrolling for hours together. An honest answer came after 3 months, that is “Try doing it for yourself and you will find such an adrenaline rush that you would like to do it again and again”

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. 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. To the giants of Silicon Valley, your time is their money, and they’re doing everything they can to keep you “engaged,” even if it’s to the detriment of your time management, wellbeing, and focus.

In 2020, the Wall Street Journal even broke a story showing Facebook knew full well what it was doing. Quoting an internal presentation, they showed that “[their] algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness.” Since it’s so profitable, however, they’ve done little to change anything, so it’s up to us to take back what’s ours.

Get back your Stolen Booty

The first step to regaining your focus is to stop celebrating multitasking and begin practicing the state of flow. If you want to regain your ability to focus, stop celebrating multitasking and practice being in a flow state.

More information than we can handle, addictive technology, and an entire industry incentivized to keep you doomscrolling for as long as possible: It’s easy to put on your victim hat when it comes to your loss of deep focus. But we too carry some of the blame.

Accept your Responsibility

For one, we’ve developed a culture of celebrating multitasking. Since our society is always chasing the next thing, we’ve adopted that mindset at work. The more boxes we can check off, the better, or so we think. Ultimately, we end up doing “performative multitasking” — we’re more concerned with looking and feeling busy than actually creating something meaningful.

Stoop Celebrating Multitasking

Of course, multitasking is a myth, a term reserved for computers with multiple processors, not humans with just one brain. So, what can you do? Reject multitasking. Stop celebrating your coworkers for bouncing around between Slack, email, and PowerPoint. Set boundaries by tuning your notifications, and aim for a single task.

Flow with the flow

A good way to practice this is to get into the state of flow that researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described. Lose yourself in a task, and lose track of time. That’s how you know you’re in flow. Any challenge that is not too difficult but also not too boring and feels intrinsically rewarding can trigger it.

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 the flow, and your power to focus will be back in no time!

Anything Worth Achievable takes time and attention

Watch this and try connecting the dots. The Nursery schools have 20-minute timetable slots. The rest of the higher classes have 45-minute slots. There are 2 hours of practicals, 3 hours of workshops, and Engineering drawings. The architects have a 7-hour design paper. You also notice two-hour-long podcasts and interviews in Leadership channels. There are one-day 5-hour workshops on deep subject matter and for leadership roles. Anything worth achieving takes time and your unwavering attention.

As the author says. “When you are unable to pay sustained attention. you are unable to achieve the things which you want to achieve”