I really enjoyed this book, as I suffer from a difficulty of attention also. It is lately harder to deep work in 2 hour blocks, or even *gulp* read a I really enjoyed this book, as I suffer from a difficulty of attention also. It is lately harder to deep work in 2 hour blocks, or even *gulp* read a book, when my phone and email can so easily distract me. And I am a person who greatly values deep learning and reading! So it was a relief to see a scientifically backed narrative that I am not alone, that this is a problem plaguing all of us. Because all it takes is a small interruption:
"A study by Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon found that if you are focusing on something and you get interrupted, on average it will take twenty-three minutes for you to get back to the same state of focus."
I didn't expect this book to tie into what I'm trying to build at my new company - - but it really hit on it. Because a key cause of our inability to focus comes from the information overload that we are all living in. And Smashing is all about building a platform that curates for people to combat exactly that!
"What they discovered is there is one mechanism that can make this happen every time. You just have to flood the system with more information. The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it."
And this isn't even our fault - we are living in a system incentivized to amp it up:
"I realized this is one of the crucial reasons why life has accelerated every decade since the 1880s: we are living in an economic machine that requires greater speed to keep going—and that inevitably degrades our attention over time. In fact, when I reflected on it, this need for economic growth seemed to be the underlying force that was driving so many of the causes of poor attention that I had learned about—our increasing stress, our swelling work hours, our more invasive technologies, our lack of sleep, our bad diets."
I think my key takeaway though is encapsulated in this quote - we need to slow down and be deliberate and be ok with going at a speed we are comfortable with. This is hard to do this as it leaves us with a massive sense of we might be missing out on things. So we have to structure our lives to focus on what we want to focus on and limit the rest.
"One of the leading experts on this topic is Guy Claxton, professor of learning sciences at the University of Winchester, who I went to interview in Sussex, in England. He has analyzed what happens to a person’s focus if they engage in deliberately slow practices, like yoga, or tai chi, or meditation, as discovered in a broad range of scientific studies, and he has shown they improve your ability to pay attention by a significant amount. I asked him why. He said that “we have to shrink the world to fit our cognitive bandwidth.� If you go too fast, you overload your abilities, and they degrade. But when you practice moving at a speed that is compatible with human nature—and you build that into your daily life—you begin to train your attention and focus. “That’s why those disciplines make you smarter. It’s not about humming or wearing orange robes.� Slowness, he explained, nurtures attention, and speed shatters it. "
I loved the description of the authors 3 month online purge, going to a beach town and just bringing books. It was interesting it took the author a few weeks to get into the groove - it takes a while. And fascinating that by the end of it the author valued going on hours long walks and just thinking. It's that thinking time where we process things in our life. And yet, I'm unable to even drive 10 min without turning on a podcast. That was great food for thought.
"I noticed that if I spent a day where I experienced three hours of flow early on, for the rest of the day, I felt relaxed and open and able to engage—to walk along the beach, or start chatting to people, or read a book, without feeling cramped, or irritable, or phone-hungry. It was like the flow was relaxing my body and opening my mind—perhaps because I knew I had done my best."
In the end, I wholeheartedly agree with this:
"I like the person I become when I read a lot of books. I dislike the person I become when I spend a lot of time on social media."
Loading...
