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

Pre-Commitment Is Successful

“In situations of low stress and safety, mind-wandering will be a gift, a pleasure, a creative force. In situations of high stress or danger, mind-wandering will be a torment.”

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

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.

The Attentional Pathogenic Culture

“The sensation of being alive in the early twenty-first century consisted of the sense that our ability to pay attention—to focus—was cracking and breaking.”

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

Social Media Negativity

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

Importance Of Sleep

"Empathy is one of the most complex forms of attention we have – and the most precious. Many of the most important advances in human history have been advances in empathy."

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

Three Ways Task Switching Degrades Your Focus

<ul><li>Use pre-commitment to stop switching tasks so much.</li><li>Don't listen to negative self-talk - You’re lazy, you’re not good enough, what’s wrong with you?</li><li>Take extended times away from social media. </li><li>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.</li><li>Sleep is not a luxury. It is essential for sustained focus.</li><li>Embrace play and unstructured free time. This can be the greatest form of focus.</li></ul>

Improve Your Attention

"Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening and how to get our attention back."--

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Productivity

Understand yourself and those around you.

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Psychology

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Society, Arts & Culture

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening—and how to get our attention back. “The book the world needs in order to win the war on distraction.”—Adam Grant, author of Think Again “Read this book to save your mind.”—Susan Cain, author of Quiet   WINNER OF THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Post, Mashable, Mindful In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding that constantly switching from device to device and tab to tab was a diminishing and depressing way to live. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions—even abandoning his phone for three months—but nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention—and he discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong.   We think our inability to focus is a personal failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces that have left us uniquely vulnerable to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. Hari found that there are twelve deep causes of this crisis, from the decline of mind-wandering to rising pollution, all of which have robbed some of our attention. In Stolen Focus, he introduces readers to Silicon Valley dissidents who learned to hack human attention, and veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD. He explores a favela in Rio de Janeiro where everyone lost their attention in a particularly surreal way, and an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore workers’ productivity.   Crucially, Hari learned how we can reclaim our focus—as individuals, and as a society—if we are determined to fight for it. Stolen Focus will transform the debate about attention and finally show us how to get it back.

JOHANN HARI

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