How To Regain Your Lost Focus And The Ability To Concentrate

The tale of how we lost the ability to focus — and how we can get it back

We’ve all been in that situation. You’re sitting down, getting ready for work, when you get a text. While you’re texting back, a news alert appears, so you switch over to read what’s going on.

But as you’re about halfway through reading the headline, you get another ping: someone liked the photo you posted the night before. And when you go to see who it was, you notice they’ve also posted new photos… is that a new partner?! A Slack notification sounds as you begin swiping through the images.

What were you up to again? Oh, yes: work.

You’re not alone in wondering what happened to your ability to concentrate. Our collective attention span appears to be dwindling at an alarming rate. And each year, more distractions and interruptions are added to the mix.

Unfortunately, this is not a coincidence. Forces beyond our control are working to deplete our ability to focus and resist distraction, from Silicon Valley to the structure of the modern workplace.

But how did we end up here? Is there any way to break free from this dizzying attention spiral? Let’s talk about this.

It’s not just you; everyone is having difficulty concentrating :

Unless you live completely off the grid, you’ve probably noticed that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to concentrate. You’re always busy, but you never seem to get anything done.

Sune Lehmann was experiencing the same issues in 2016. His ability to focus deeply was fading, and he was more susceptible to distractions than ever before. Lehmann is a professor at Denmark’s Technical University, so he didn’t dismiss the nagging feeling that his concentration was slipping. Instead, he oversaw a study to see if there was any evidence to back up his suspicions.

He and his team discovered something interesting after analyzing various metrics across online platforms: Conversation topics trended on Twitter for an average of 17.5 hours in 2013 before people lost interest and moved on to another topic. By 2016, that figure had dropped to 11.6 hours.

That’s a six-hour reduction in just three years!

The study finds similar results on platforms such as Google and Reddit. In other words, the more time we spend online, the shorter our attention spans become.

So, is it really just the internet that’s stealing our attention?

Yes, indeed. No, but also no. It isn’t as simple as ones and zeros.

As you can see, Lehmann also examined every book uploaded to Google Books between the 1880s and today. And he discovered that this phenomenon predates the internet. Trending topics emerge and fade at an increasing rate with each passing decade.

The internet has undeniably accelerated this rate. Now, information is not only always available to us; it also intrudes on our lives through the constant pings and notifications from our laptops and smartphones.

Apps and online platforms are designed to be addictive, not by chance :

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter — the fact that these apps and other online platforms consume so much of your time isn’t due to a flaw in their design. They’re meant to be addictive. After all, there’s a reason Silicon Valley refers to its clients as “users.”

Most of these platforms’ business models are based on time — or, as they call it, engagement. This is the amount of time a user spends interacting with a product.

One thing I’d like to point out is that they’re not just here to give you pleasure and a good time.

If it’s free, you’re the product, and that’s the catch!

That is the metric by which tech firms measure their success — not money, but minutes. Money, however, does play a role. Because the longer you spend “engaging,” the more likely it is that the companies will sell advertisements to you.

The more you participate, the more companies track your behavior and create a profile that is specifically designed to target you with specific ads. We do not pay for social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram with our money. But we do pay with another valuable, limited resource: our attention.

Algorithms prefer outrage to the community :

Online platforms erode our focus and take advantage of one of our most valuable resources — our attention — for financial gain. However, these same platforms have the potential to be a force for good, strengthening communities and driving collective action.

Now let's go on a trip to the Complexo do Alemão favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to better understand this potential.

The Brazilian government takes a tough stance in this densely populated, low-income neighborhood, regularly sending in tanks to quell unrest. And it’s a well-known fact that the police shoot to kill. When children get in the way of the cops’ bullets, they plant drugs or weapons on them and claim self-defense.

Let me tell you a short story here so you can visualize things :

Raull Santiago is a resident of Alemão. He also runs the Facebook page “Coletivo Papo Reto,” which collects and distributes videos of police shooting unarmed citizens. Many favela residents have been inspired by the page to organize a protest against their treatment. And it has changed public opinion in Brazil, where favelas like Alemão are often despised.

However, the situation in Alemão has deteriorated since the election of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s far-right president. And here’s the thing: Bolsonaro’s victory, like Coletivo Papo Reto’s, can be attributed in part to Facebook. Bolsonaro’s campaign flooded social media with clickbait, fear-mongering ads — and he was elected.

As a result, what binds us can also divide us. Recently, it appears that online platforms have been more intent on dividing than connecting. And it all comes down to algorithms.

There is no ethics in the algorithm. It neither condones nor condemns; it simply codes. People watching it, on the other hand, feel, believe, and judge. For some, the more misinformation they are exposed to, the more normal — even credible — it appears. A 2018 study of extreme right-wing militants in the United States discovered that the majority of them were radicalized on YouTube.

Ditch multitasking — recovering focus is about finding flow :

Can I ask you how many things are you doing at the moment? You could be doing nothing but reading or listening to this article. If this describes you, you are monotasking.

It’s easy — and not incorrect — to blame our shrinking attention spans on our devices and the easy access they provide to an attention-sucking online world. But, like an artfully cropped Instagram photo, that’s not the whole picture.

There’s a fundamental flaw in how we define “focus.”

When we multitask, we are not performing multiple tasks at the same time. We’re juggling between them at breakneck speed. And each switch incurs what is known as a “switch-cost” effect. When you switch between tasks — or are interrupted in the middle of one — your brain must recalibrate, which reduces your mental performance.

A Hewlett Packard-commissioned study compared a group that worked on a task uninterrupted with a group that was distracted during the course of their task. According to the study, members of the distracted group temporarily lost an average of ten IQ points while completing their task.

The good news,

according to Csikszentmihalyi, is that anyone can gain access to flow if they meet a few key conditions. First, the task at hand must be intrinsically rewarding; when you’re in flow, it’s the process that engages you, not the product. So, unless you have a strong interest in data entry, you’re unlikely to find flow when filling out spreadsheets.

High-performing individuals, such as athletes, musicians, and scientists, frequently attribute their success to their ability to enter flow states.

However, in a society that has decided that multitasking is a virtue and that speed and output are more important than deep focus, the average person is finding it increasingly difficult to achieve flow.

We can get our attention back.

Making room for other forms of focus, such as flow, in a world obsessed with multitasking, is a radical act. And it is possible, but it is not as simple as slowing down and turning off.

Using airplane mode won’t help you much as long as you live and work in a system that encourages you to multitask, values productivity above all else, and encourages you to spend increasing amounts of time in online spaces designed to sap your focus. It is the system that must be altered.

Fortunately, change may be on the way in Silicon Valley, where disillusioned designers are starting to fight back against our attention crisis. Former Google engineer Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin — yes, the same Aza who invented the infinite scroll — want to see a non-predatory social media emerge from the ashes of our current attention spans.

Social media was created to capture our attention. However, Harris and Raskin are confident that it can be redesigned to reclaim our attention. How would this new social media landscape appear? They have a few suggestions.

For one thing, the infinite scroll would be disabled. All of those inconsequential “rewards” like hearts, likes, and shares could be disabled as well. Instead, you could get a daily roundup of what’s new on your feed, which is meant to discourage you from checking multiple times a day. And the ability of technology to influence human behavior could be used for good. You could tell the platform how much time you wanted to spend online, and it could help you get there.

It may also assist you in achieving other objectives. Do you want to try going vegan? You might be able to connect with online groups that share vegan recipes through the platform. Are you concerned about climate change? The platform may connect you with local activist groups both online and offline.

In the great scale of things, these are all minor adjustments. They should, however, leave us with a sense of optimism. They demonstrate that there are solutions to the current collective attention crisis. We can reclaim our attention… if we can just concentrate on the task at hand.

In conclusion

As a result of our accelerated pace of life and communication, our attention spans are shortening. The internet, particularly the rise of apps and platforms that prey on our attention, has amplified this attention drain. And it’s not because of a flaw or weakness in the individual.

The majority of these attention-grabbing techniques are deliberate; they are intricately designed to keep you distracted. To combat them, large-scale, systemic change is required — both on an individual level and from the tech designers who created these systems in the first place.

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