1. Our dwindling attention spans predate the internet, but their decline is accelerating at an alarming rate.
2. Current social media platforms are designed to make you addicted so they can make a profit.
3. If you want to get back your ability to focus, stop celebrating multitaskin...

We have a saying in Germany: “The only thing that’s free in life is death — and even for that, you’ll have to pay with your life.” It means that everything comes at a price, even if the price is hidden at first.

Out of personal dissatisfaction with his ability to focus, Danish professor Sune Lehmann conducted a study about attention. He concluded that, even before the internet, the rise and fall of popular books in the last 200 years indica...

The culprit is the increasing rate at which we can spread information. From letters to the radio to telephones and live TV — the internet is just the tip of the iceberg. This “great acceleration ,” as Robert Colvile...

Social media is a great example. We don’t pay with cash to use services like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, but in that word, “using,” already lies their true cost: our time and attention. Infinitely scrolling feeds, vain buttons that issue

Hari packages the topic well. In outlining the situation as a global attention crisis, he conveys to us the gravity of the situation. He deftly compiles the history, latest developments, and up-to-date research on the subject, and he still manages to sneak in some personal recommendations as to h...

To the giants of Silicon Valley, your time is their money, and they’re doing everything they can to keep you “engaged,” even if it’s to the detriment of your time management, wellbeing, and focus .

In 2020, the Wall Street Journal even

Stolen Focus  explains why our attention spans have been dwindling for decades, how technology accelerates this worrying trend, and what we can do to reclaim our focus and thus our capacity to live meaningful li...

The 14-year-old high school student who’s so busy maintaining all her social media profiles that she barely has time to pay attention in class, the 27-year-old young professional who feels totally overwhelmed at a new job two weeks in, and anyone who feels like they just can’t focus the way they ...

The faster we can spread information, the more information we distribute, and the more rains down on every single one of us on any given day . Unlike the latest hot topic on Twitter, this trend isn’t going to go away any time soon, and

A good way to practice this is to get in the state of flow that researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described. Lose yourself in a task, and lose track of time. That’s how you know you’re in flow, and any challenge that is not too difficult bu...

According to Johann Hari in his book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention , he explains patterns like the fact that half of ...

For one, we’ve developed a culture of celebrating multitasking. Since our society is now always chasing the next thing, we’ve adopted that same mindset at work. The more boxes we can check off, the better, or so we think. Ultimate...

Of course, multitasking is a myth , a term reserved for computers with multiple processors, not humans with just one brain. So, what can you do? Reject multitasking. Stop celebrating your coworkers for bouncing around bet...