How to Focus in the Digital Age

Hint: “Get off your phone” isn’t one of them.

Here are the strategies you’ve heard over and over again:

• Pomodoro Method (25-min on, 5-min off)
• Prioritization
• Willpower and self-discipline that shove you through your to-dos you don’t want to do

As someone in between a Millennial and Gen Z, my daily screen time probably exceeds your nightly sleep cycle. Those “strategies” listed above are what I’ve been told time and time again. And not once have they ever worked.

Let me reframe this topic: because technology distorts our focus, we must rewire our mindset to work around those particular distortions.

According to Curt Steinhorst, a Forbes columnist, world-renowned focus expert, and founder of Focuswise, there are 4 dimensions of focus:

1. Clarity — your focus if the task clearly matters more
2. Capacity — how much focus you can provide
3. Curiosity — what drives your attention
4. Community — who directs your attention

Clarity’s technology distortion: space

Hourly emails, social media notifications, and Slack messages distort our relationship to the physical space around us.

When we are bored — monotonous Zoom lectures and meetings, time-consuming presentations, and long-winded news articles — we are able to escape at any time just by reaching for our phones and scrolling through Instagram. Even on a laptop, iMessage for Apple users, Youtube music playlists for focus, and desktop-organizing bouts for procrastination are “productive” ways to distract us from our intended focus.

With COVID-19 and a global rise in working from home, many of us who struggle to focus at home have designated particular work stations — whether that be a separate office room or a simple desk with a lamp. However, when the distractions are placed right on your “work station”, escaping from your current space is one click away.

How do you overcome this tech distortion of your current space?

Keep your technological distractions separate from your workspace. If that means walking to the kitchen and taking your phone for a stretch break, then turning off your notifications when you return for meetings — do that!

This is key because the largest connection between your short and long-term memories is spatial. Also, note how this is different from “getting off your phone”.

Capacity’s technology distortion: time

The more screens we own, the more content we consume: an average of 12 hours every day.

The more media we consume in smaller amounts of time, the more deluded we are about our efficiency and productivity.

We’re not doing more. We’re just multitasking; we spend more time doing more things poorly.

Multitasking can be a strength, but not for the average person’s daily workload:

• Speed: 40% drop in efficiency
• Quality: 10 point drop in average IQ
• Prioritization: 2.6 hours per weekday are spent on non-vital tasks
• Engagement: loss of emotional connection

How do we reset our relationship with time?

Depending on how attached to your planner you are (hour-by-hour, daily, weekly, monthly) plan for one task per time duration. If you plan weekly and list out 7–10 tasks, don’t start 3–4 tasks at once without finishing them.

Curiosity’s technology distortion: information

Curiosity is the force that drives our attention. This can be innate or cultivated since curiosity is a teachable skill.

The information we load into our short-term memory from endless scrolling is not moving into our long-term storage. Why do students forget everything after a test? We crammed and we weren’t interested in the subject.

Is this even a problem? Yes and no.

It’s not because you need to know college-level statistics for your investment banking job interview. Rather, we’ve come to a point in society where the half-life of a skill set is 5 years. In 5 years, a professional skill you’ve learned is half as valuable. So this urgent turnover rate suggests it’s okay if you don’t retain the information long-term.

However, this also suggests constant learning will be a trend for everyone from here on out. If you’re incapable of truly learning (not short-term memorizing), “success” is more unstable in this period of rapid change.

How do we reprogram our relationship with information?

Millennials, Gen Z, and future generations have a different relationship with their work than our elder counterparts. Our work is more personally meaningful and in-line with our values, while also being more technologically integrated with our hobbies. We don’t like to hear “you can’t always do what you want”, since many within our generation have created our own businesses from our passions. Thus, what drives our attention is what interests us.

However, the key is to cultivate curiosity in what doesn’t pique our interests. We need to constantly update and upgrade our skills, and as Warren Buffet famously states: knowledge is compound.

Community’s technology distortion: relationships

Who directs our attention has been distorted when we actively choose to engage with friends online over friends in-person. When home and work life are now overlapping due to COVID-19 work-from-home, leaving your work friends for work is no longer an option.

After university, you’ll see that your secondary school friends will be different from your university friends from your work friends. Imagine forcing two or three completely different groups to intermingle, when one group cares nothing about the other group.

You can scroll from one Kpop star to the next on Instagram, then to your family’s feed, then to your high school friends’, then to your new uni friends’ posts. Your attention is being directed from one completely unrelated group to another — so choosing what to focus on is even more difficult.

How do we maintain our connections and compartmentalize without isolating your relationships?

Make time for different groups and separate them if needed. Although COVID makes this more difficult, working from home allows for family time. Schedule Facetimes with respective, differentiated friend groups or responsibly socially distance and gather in small quantities.

Understand that your colleagues will see you at home, and your family will see you working. If you have different work and home personalities, compartmentalizing your physical workspace is key to avoiding burnout and cabin fever.

How did I navigate quarantine with this in mind?

As a student without a full-time job and fewer financial obligations, crafting a daily to-do list during the pandemic was difficult. However, despite good and bad periods, my most-focused times were when I devoted all of my “focus” energy to one singular task embedded within my daily routine. This task required me to wake up at the same time every morning and participate in a series of live webinars.

I listened to these webinars in my living room, just far enough from my two key distractions: the bedroom that doubled as my office and my stockpile of snacks near the kitchen. With my phone charging in my bedroom and Apple’s “Do Not Disturb” function on my laptop, no notifications could interrupt my hour-long morning work routine. Some webinars were more relevant and engaging than others. For the ones that bored me, I would Google the topic and further research particular aspects of that topic that piqued my interest.

I understand work meetings are just important enough to tune in for, but not always efficient nor engaging enough to actively listen to. If you have control over your meeting schedule, choose times throughout the day after your breaks: 10 AM snacks, 2 PM caffeine boosts, 4 PM post-nap periods, etc. Depending on when you wake up, schedule breaks in between meetings and after meals.

I wasn’t able to choose my meeting times, since I was working alongside Hong Kong and Italian time. 11 PM meetings, 8 AM check-ins, etc. However, consistency and a lot of “what am I getting out of this opportunity” pushed my unmotivated brain past procrastination temptations and unfocused multitasking.

Finding your own version of focus is difficult when there are social media algorithms and advertisements designed to hold our attention. However, understanding how our screens skew our perception of time, space, other people, and ourselves is key to overcoming the digital distractions of this age.