Heidi Thompson's Key Ideas from Stolen Focus
by Johann Hari

We now live in ‘an attentional pathogenic culture’ – an environment in which sustained and deep focus is extremely hard for all of us, and you have to swim upstream to achieve it. It is not your fault you cannot focus.

Attention spans are decreasing at the time we need them most. One of the biggest contributors to inaction on big issues such as climate change is the lack of focus. When attention breaks down, problem-solving breaks down.

• Use pre-commitment to stop switching tasks so much.
• Don't listen to negative self-talk - You’re lazy, you’re not good enough, what’s wrong with you?
• Take extended times away from social media.
• Embrace mind-wandering. Letting your mind wander is not a crumbling of attention but in fact a crucial form of attention in its own right.
• Sleep is not a luxury. It is essential for sustained focus.
• Embrace play and unstructured free time. This can be the greatest form of focus.

• Switching cost - You lose focus switching between tasks
• Screw-up effect. When you switch between tasks, errors that wouldn’t have happened otherwise start to creep in.
• Creativity drain - In the long run, you are likely to be much less creative.

Resolving clearly to do something and making a pledge to stick to it helps you focus.

• The less you sleep, the more your world blurs in every way – the ability to focus, ability to think deeply, ability to make connections
• During sleep, your brain cleans itself of waste that has accumulated during the day
• During sleep, your energy levels are restored and replenished
• Dreaming allows you to revisit stressful moments without releasing stress hormones, which makes it easier to handle stress.

• On average, we will look at something negative and outrageous a lot more than something peaceful and calm
• Every word of moral outrage increases the chances of retweets on Twitter and words that increased retweet rates are attack, bad, blame
• Social media sites are designed to train your minds to crave frequent rewards
• Social media sites get to know what makes you tick. They learn what you like to look at, what excites you, what angers you
• Social media sites make you feel that you are surrounded by other people’s anger
• Fake news travels six times faster on Twitter than real news.