Insights from Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. Why You Can’t Pay Attention and how to think deeply again. In this article, you will learn how to counteract two troubling trends and take back your focus.
Focus = fulfillment
- Without deep focus, we won’t be able to do worthwhile projects.
- If we don’t keep our focus on a major objective, we shall wander through life. “What man needs is To strive and fight for a worthwhile aim,” Victor Frankl said, paraphrasing.
- Moreover, if we lack internal focus, we won’t have the self-awareness necessary to identify worthwhile objectives.
Hence, three different sorts of focus are needed for fulfillment: spotlight, starlight, and daylight.
- A constant spotlight enables us to concentrate on a task for long enough to make significant progress or gain insightful knowledge.
- Starlight aids in recalling our long-term objectives.
- Daylight enables us to assess our past experiences and choose which long-term objectives to pursue.
Nakakalungkot, two unsettling trends—the rapid acceleration and the gradual deprivation— ay nagpapadilim sa ating spotlights, starlight, and daylight.
The great acceleration
A debate that was among the top 50 trends on Twitter in 2013 was trending for an average of 17.5 hours. A top 50 debate trended for just 11.9 hours on average three years later.
With more exposure to information, we become impatient and less eager to delve deeply into a subject or take on difficult tasks.
Just go back to the last time you skimmed through a lot of information, whether it was while you were catching up on group conversations, reading the news, reading a few Facebook posts, or scrolling through social media or your inbox of unread emails.
At the end of the session, did you feel calm, present, and ready to work deeply? How much of the information do you recall?
“My desire to absorb a tsunami of information without losing my ability to focus was like my desire to eat at McDonald’s every day and stay trim—an impossible dream. The size and capacity of the human brain hasn’t significantly changed in 40,000 years.”
Johann Hari says,
The gradual deprivation
According to the National Sleep Foundation, the amount of sleep that people get on average each night has decreased by 20% over the past century and is still declining. The CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, acknowledged this company’s objective in 2017: to keep consumers watching television and movies at night.
We compete with sleep, and we’re winning, he declared. For years, businesses like Netflix, Facebook, and Google have employed legions of programmers to keep us awake and prevent us from falling asleep.
But, businesses are now using cutting-edge AI that has spent millions of hours studying human behavior to optimize content and keep us up at night.
If we have a 6:00 AM wake-up time, we might think it’s okay to go to bed at midnight rather than 10:30 PM. Nevertheless, the final 20% of the seven to eight hours of sleep we require each night is when we get 80% of our REM sleep.
We organize and process days’ worth of information while we are in REM sleep. If we don’t get 80% of the REM sleep we need, we wake up the next day feeling intellectually drained and unable to focus or quickly take in new information.
“Ten days of six hours of sleep a night was all it took to become as impaired in performance as going without sleep for twenty‐four hours straight.”
Sleep researcher Matthew Walker has found
Take back your focus
Restore daylight and starlight throughout the first hour of the day before stepping up your spotlight.
- Consider these three inquiries: What is most important to me? What are my values and strong points? How can I add value that is special to others?
- List your long-term goals and consider the weekly and daily goals you need to achieve them.
- Concentrate intently on one daily goal until the 60‐minute morning focus block ends. Whatever you decide to do, make sure to do slowly and deliberately.. As Johann Hari says, “Slowness nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.”
Gumawa ng isang “book first” phone checking habit by opening an eBook reader app and reading a few pages of a book before using your phone to access fresh content (such as the news, social media, email, etc.).
Because books enable us to ingest information in a linear fashion and delve progressively deeper on a subject, rather than manically jumping from one thing to the next, developing the habit of reading books first will shape deeper focus.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades researching the “flow state,” and he discovered that reading is the most typical activity that induces flow.
Assuming technology will keep you up at night unless you make a pre-commitment to getting a good night’s sleep is the first step in combating chronic sleep deprivation.
Halimbawa, set up an application like Freedom to ban all apps two hours before going to bed. You might also establish a household rule like, “We turn off all electronics at 8:00 PM and play games or read books.” If you use a gadget after 8:00 PM, you’ll look like a phony.
“We have to decide now: Do we value attention and focus? Does being able to think deeply matter to us? Do we want it for our children? If we do, then we have to fight for it.”
‐ Johann Hari
Author: The Pinoy Engineer
GOOD TO GREAT BOOK SUMMARY FOR FILIPINOS
In this blog, you will find the Best Book Summaries and Productivity Tips in Taglish (Tagalog-English) made specifically and exclusively for Pinoys in and out of the Philippines tulad mo, Kabayan. Self-improvement reading is one of the most productive things to do.
GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY FOR PINOYS
Sabi nga ni Jim Rohn – “Ang pagkakaiba sa pagitan ng kung nasaan ka ngayon at kung nasaan ka limang taon mula ngayon ay makikita sa kalidad ng mga librong babasahin mo”.
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