Stolen Focus Book Summary

/ Productivity, Business, Personality Development, Self-Development / By

The book Stolen Focus explores why we’ve been losing our ability to focus for years, how technology is hastening this alarming trend, and what we can do to regain our focus and, by extension, our ability to lead fulfilling lives.

I’ll never forget the day when multitasking nearly cost me my life. I was travelling the same three kilometers home that I had travelled countless times before, but this time, I wasn’t paying attention. I was tinkering with my iPod when I suddenly felt the right front tyre strike the shoulder and vibrate.

STOLEN FOCUS BOOK SUMMARY
STOLEN FOCUS BOOK SUMMARY

In a split second, I jerked the steering wheel to the left out of instinct, and the car began to slide. I was able to stabilize the car because of the several driving safety courses I had taken, but I easily could have ended up in the ditch or much worse. Naturally, I’ve been much harder about not using my phone while driving ever since, but I still multitask when driving.

Johann Hari claims that I’m not alone. He addresses trends including the fact that half of all young people text while driving in his book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention. The book also explains why doing so can cause our attention to be reduced by as much as 37%. Of course, Hari also offers some answers.

  • Our focus is being lost through a variety of factors, but it is deteriorating rapidly, which is a worry.

Danish researcher Sune Lehmann undertook a study on attention because he was personally unhappy with his capacity for concentration. Even before the internet, he came to the conclusion that shorter trend cycles could be seen in the rise and decline of popular novels during the previous 200 years. This issue is made worse by the internet. The average time that issues trend on Twitter decreased from over 17 to just over 11 hours between 2013 and 2016, a decrease of over 30%.

The speed at which we can disseminate knowledge is to blame. The internet is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to communication methods, which also include mail, the radio, telephones, and live television.

The root of the issue is this “vast acceleration,” as Robert Colvile refers to it. In 2004, we read roughly 174 newspapers, which is likely to be much more than the 40 newspapers we consumed daily in the 1980s.

The more information we disseminate and the faster it spreads, the more information falls on each and every one of us every day. This trend, unlike the most recent trending subject on Twitter, is here to stay, and our brains aren’t developing quickly enough to keep up with it.

  • The majority of the major social media platforms of today intentionally abuse your attention in order to profit.

The only thing that is free in life is death, and even then, you will pay with your life, according to a proverb that is popular in Germany. It implies that everything has a cost, even if that cost is initially concealed.

A good example is social media. Although we don’t pay money to use sites like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, their ultimate cost—our time and attention—is already implicit in the word “using.” It’s all done on purpose to make you addicted, with endlessly scrolling feeds, vanity buttons that release dopamine with each tap via likes, shares, and comments, and algorithms that feed you ridiculous content to keep you “using.”

Your time is valuable to the titans of Silicon Valley, and they will stop at nothing to keep you “engaged,” regardless of the consequences for your time management, wellbeing, and concentration.

The Wall Street Journal even published a report in 2020 that demonstrated Facebook was fully aware of what it was doing. They demonstrated that “[their] algorithms exploit the human brain’s drive to divisiveness” by quoting an internal presentation. But because it’s so profitable, they haven’t changed much, so it’s up to us to reclaim what is rightfully ours.

  • Stop glorifying multitasking and start putting the state of flow into practise as the first step towards restoring your focus.

Overwhelming amounts of information, addicting technology, and a whole sector of the economy that wants to keep you doomscrolling for as long as possible When it comes to your loss of intense attention, it’s simple to assume the victim role. However, we are also partially to blame.

We’ve created a culture that values multitasking, for starters. We have the same mentality at work because our culture is currently one of constantly seeking the next novelty. We tend to believe that the more boxes we can tick off, the better. In the end, we just end up engaging in “performative multitasking” because we care more about seeming and feeling busy than we do about really doing something worthwhile.

Multitasking, of course, is a fallacy; the phrase refers to machines with multiple processors, not people with a single brain. What can you do, then? Refuse to multitask. Stop praising your coworkers for switching between email, PowerPoint, and Slack. Try to single-task and set boundaries by adjusting your notification settings.

Getting into the “state of flow,” as described by researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is a fantastic approach to practice this. Lose track of time when you become immersed in a task. Any challenge that is neither overly challenging nor monotonous and that feels inherently satisfying might put you in flow.

The topic is presented well by Hari. He makes clear the seriousness of the situation by describing it as a global attention crisis. He skillfully gathers the background information, current events, and studies on the subject, and he still finds room for a few of his own suggestions for how we may do better. Reading Stolen Focus is an excellent way to improve your ability to focus in the twenty-first century.

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