HOW TO GET YOUR BRAIN TO FOCUS

A few years ago, I began to observe something in my own behavior that made me a bit uncomfortable. And that was that from the moment that I woke up to the end of the day, my life was a series of screens. I started the day with the thing that woke me up first thing in the morning, my phone, and so I sat there in bed watching various cooking videos on Instagram and bouncing around between a bunch of different applications. But then it was time to get out of bed and cook breakfast, and so the thing that I focused then on, in addition to the omelette in the pan, was the iPad that was right next to the oven. And then it was time to do some work, and so I went to a different screen which was attached to another screen itself.

All the while, this little devil on my wrist was tapping and beeping and blooping and distracting me as I was trying to get important stuff done. But there was one particular offender out of all of these different devices that I wasted more time on than anything else. That was this dastardly thing: my phone. I could spend hours on this thing every single day. And so I decided to essentially, for all intents and purposes, get rid of the thing for a month. As an experiment, I thought, "I`m going to live on this thing for just 30 minutes every single day at a maximum." And so this is the amount of time I have for maps, this is the amount of time to call my mother, this is the amount of time I have for everything that I could possibly want to do, to listen to music, to listen to podcasts, and I observed what happened during this time. It took about a week to adjust downward into a new, lower level of stimulation, but once I did, I noticed that three curious things began to happen. First, my attention span grew. It was like I could focus on things, not effortlessly, but with much more ease than I could before this experiment started. In addition to this, though, as I was going about the world and especially when my mind wandered a bit, I had more ideas that my mind arrived at, and on top of this, I had more plans and thoughts about the future.

Getting rid of one simple device led to these three effects. Why? Noticing this a few years back led me on this long journey to get to the bottom of what it takes to focus in a world of distraction. I pored over hundreds of research papers from front to back at my office.

I don't know if you've ever watched one of those crime shows where somebody's solving a murder. And so they have this big Bristol board, and there's string attached to papers attached to memos attached to newspaper clippings - this is like what the state of my office was. I flew out to meet experts around the world who study focus; I conducted more experiments on myself until the point I had 25,000 words of research notes about why this is the case. How does technology influence our attention and our ability to focus? I want to start with the attention spans that we have. This is how we pay attention to the world around us and how much control we have over our focus. The research around this particular area is fascinating and wonderful it got me excited.