TL;DR (too long, don’t read)
- Shortening attention spans are a myth
- But we are too distracted in life
- Give yourself mental breaks and try meditating to improve your focus
- Be careful not to go overboard – too much focus can make you neglect other areas of life
This is a post about attention spans, distractedness, and finding focus. It’s also a test of your attention span. Want to see how well you can do? Read on.
What has happened to our attention spans?
Apparently, our attention spans have shrunk from 12 seconds to 8 seconds since 2000, meaning we have a shorter attention span than a goldfish.
However, the BBC found these figures to be completely unfounded – not to mention unfair to goldfish, who are prized for their memories and learning ability in many scientific studies.
Attention spans are difficult to measure: they depend on the task at hand, our age, and our general state of mind. There aren’t enough studies comparing how our attention span has changed over time. Overall, they’re not a very useful concept – let’s stop worrying about them for now.
The real issue is distractedness
Modern life is full of distractions. Our phones constantly buzz with notifications from social networks, emails, messaging services, and annoying built-in news apps that are impossible to uninstall.
Back in 2005 email was regarded as a distraction apocalypse. Now it feels like an innocent era.
Being distracted is a significant modern-day challenge. Here’s why:
It limits what you can enjoy
Being constantly on the alert for distractions can hold you back from “slow-burner” activities. A good book might not get going for the first few chapters – but once it does, the wait is worth it. Some of the best TV shows involve grand plotlines that gently unfold over time. Some classical music concerts can be incredible – but you have to be willing to sit still for an hour or more.
It’s holding you back at work
It’s estimated that after every distraction it takes you 25 minutes to return fully to your original task. Calvin Newport, author of Deep Work, estimates that we experience a 50% drop in productivity when we’re in a “state of distraction”. We’ve all had days where we felt like we got nothing done because we were responding to emails all day. And there is some work that simply needs your full focus and attention – particularly creative tasks such as writing and drawing.
What can you do about it?
As with any advice guide, regular exercise and sleep always help. Exercise is good for both the brain and body, and when you intersperse periods of work with exercise, you’ll come back to work feeling refreshed. As for sleep, here are some tips from the sleep foundation.
Aside from this, here’s some key strategies to try:
Switching off
Naturally the most obvious course of action is to limit your distractions. Turn off notifications on your phone, turn off desktop notifications, and try to “batch” dealing with emails. You might set aside an hour at the beginning of the day and an hour at the end for example.
Give yourself downtime
There’s increasing evidence that mental downtime – time when you have nothing in particular to focus on or process – is just as important for memory and learning as the time we actually spend learning. Brain imaging studies show that our brain is no less active when we’re experiencing mental downtime – and scientists are gradually beginning to understand just what’s going on.
What we know so far is that the mind uses any time it can to process what you’ve learned, strengthen neural connections, and refresh its capacity to take on new things. Downtime can also “bulk up” our attention “muscle” – enabling you to achieve focus for longer periods of time.
Let yourself have fun
It sounds completely counterintuitive, but plan in some time to have fun. If someone sent you a funny video at work, don’t completely ignore it – in fact, schedule it in! The point is to be in control of when you let your mind engage in something else. But it is clear that switching away from the task at hand can be useful sometimes.
Meditate
Studies have shown that those who practice meditation demonstrate increased memory and focus, in addition to the many health benefits that we already know about. Meditation isn’t quite the same thing as having mental downtime, but it does involve turning away from the outside world, giving your thoughts a chance to roam free.
Is it all this simple?
Despite the issues we’ve outlined above, being distractible has its uses. In fact, many regard it as a key evolutionary trait – essential for keeping us on our guard and looking out for threats. In our cave-dwelling days we would have been watching out for intruders or a rogue fire getting out of control. Ignorance of such threats would have been deadly. In the modern day, we benefit from smoke alarms and home security systems – but our ignorance of the world around us can still bring us problems. Consider the gifted academic, scribbling away at their desk, oblivious to the clothes all over the floor and the dishes piling up in the sink. Or someone so obsessed with their social media profile that they’re ignoring their partner and children. In short, too much focus can make you disengaged in other areas of life.
Some call this having “tunnel vision”. Others call it “having a one-track mind”. But the vast majority of us are capable of using synonyms interchangeably.
The challenge is to achieve a healthy “attention balance”. While it’s useful to be able to focus on the task at hand, the reality is that life is messy and you can’t always predict which area of your life you’ll need to deal with at any one time.
How to temper your focus
If you’ve made it this far, you probably don’t have any difficulties with staying focussed. Congratulations!
However, as we’ve seen, it is also possible to be too focussed. So let’s look at ways to temper that focus:
The life chart
BBC Science Focus recommends making a “life chart”, covering the main sections of your life: work, family, and health. This is a good way to make sure you’re not focussing on one area to the detriment of the rest. Get in the habit of checking the chart, considering each aspect of your life in turn, and putting on anything that’s pressing.
If you want to take things further, you might consider this yearly planner, called “8760 hours”. The planner is divided into 12 “life areas”, often highly abstract, including “Values & Purpose”, “Character & Identity” and “Adventure & Creativity”.
Apps
An app like Todoist allows you to track your tasks and organise them by “Project”. It comes with ready-made projects such as “Home” and “Work”, acting as a digital version of the BBC Focus life chart.
You could also try Trello. This app lets you create boards for different topics, so you can see with a glance everything that’s happening in your life. It takes a little longer to set up and know your way around, but it’s useful for those of us who like to think “visually”.
If you’ve made it to the very end of this article, either you have a healthy ability to focus, or this post was sufficiently entertaining. Either one or both of us deserves a congratulations!
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