Stolen focus by Johann Hari is the book I wished I’d written. (you can watch the Youtube video about this here if you prefer listening).
I listened to this as an audiobook with Hari reading it himself, it’s the second of his books that I have read following Lost Connections about the causes of depression.
Hari is such a wonderful writer because he’s happy to talk about his own problems and difficulties around both depression and loss of attention that make his writing so authentic.
The story behind this book and my relationship with this book though has to go back at least 7 years.
As I’ve discussed in these pages previously, I turned off Facebook and twitter and Instagram in around 2015.
I only really turned them on a few years prior to that but I went ‘all in’ (particularly on Twitter) as I tried to make my name and grab attention as much as I could.
By the time I got things rolling I had organically captured 2,500 followers on Twitter and rising which at that time was a fair number and (at least in my arrogant eyes) a fair amount of influence.
In 2015 I found myself in my kitchen flicking through Facebook later at night whilst my wife was upstairs in bed.
I ended up on the dental gym page which is not a page I would have had any desire to be on (this is not a criticism of the people on that page, it’s just that they’re not my people) and I had an epiphany.
I wondered why I was downstairs in the kitchen looking at this when I should be upstairs talking to my wife and so I switched it off.
Over the years that has raised a few eyebrows and we have implemented the use of social media in our business as a controlled variable for spreading our reputation and our message (that does not sit so easily with me at times).
But I don’t engage myself at all now.
I think my last post on Instagram was in 2015 and it might have been a picture of my breakfast.
The point of this though is that Johann Hari has written pretty much about the reasons that I stopped in 2015 and now explains that there is a growing number of people who are realising the problems of the genie that we have unleashed from the bottle.
It’s worth mentioning here that Hari’s book is not an antidote for the loss of attention problem because the solution to this problem is possibly beyond the whole human race.
It’s a multi-faceted problem, not just related to social media or electronic communication but also due to pollution and consumerism and the annexable speeding up of society over time.
You don’t have the will power to avoid it.
Avoiding digital communication (particularly for our children) is a little bit like imagining you exposing your children to drugs in a controlled way.
Imagine going to your 10-year-old and saying, “you can take this for an hour today, but you can’t have it anymore after that”.
How do you think that’s going to work out?
In Stolen Focus by Hari, he goes in deep to the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma which, if you haven’t seen you really must watch.
He talks to Tristan who is the former ethicist of Google who blew the lid off this quite hard and explores the whole issue that most of the guys in Silicon Valley don’t let their children on social media (never get high on your own supply).
As I return back from a holiday where I pretty much reduced my exposure to the world of electronic stuff by a significant amount. I open up emails and messages and clinical management systems and I feel my demeaner changing and my anxiety rising.
And so, although Stolen Focus is not a self-help book and will not help you to counter the problems that you find, it does offer some suggestions which I have some experience of which could just make a little bit of a difference when you find yourself overwhelmed by the interruption to your attention.
1) Every single day put your phone on silent and make sure your notifications are off for a period of time. Try your best to tie that up with being outside.
Immediately turn all your notifications off except for phone calls and texts.
I did this 7 years ago and it has certainly not hampered my career or my advancement in dentistry.
2) Don’t infinite scroll.
Previously websites were designed as a simple page and in order to get to the next bit of the website you had to actively load the page again.
Some years ago, infinite scrolling was invented which is where you can tap and tap and tap and tap with your thumb as long as you like. It’s now seriously estimated that the loss of attention over 2-3 billion people that infinite scrolling has created equates to 200,000 lives lost a day of attention timespan
200,000 lives every single day.
Finally, see people without your phones and electronic devices on.
Try to begin to interact again with people face-to-face and try to have a situation where phones are put aside or even locked away for at least parts of your day and watch what happens.
Many people cleverer than me have written about this and many people will write about it again but as Hari attests to in his book, if collectively we continue to lose our focus and our ability to concentrate on the most important things, how are we ever supposed to solve the most important problems we have.
Blog Post Number - 3108
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