Awesome to see Johann Hari’s keynote at SXSW Sydney. I’ve watched a lot of his interviews and podcasts over the years – and checked out his books of course. I really like how he communicates.
His Stolen Focus talk highlighted some of the key themes from his book and shared in an engaging way with plenty of humour and compelling emotion.
Read his book and watch/listen to the podcasts he’s been on to get it directly – his interview on Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett is one I enjoyed – but here’s my summary based on evidence…
People find it much harder to focus attention now than a few years ago. This isn’t an issue of willpower. It’s something that’s actively being done to us.
Our attention is valuable and matters
Our attention is valuable and matters. The switch cost effect is real and expensive. We lose 10 IQ points when we try to multitask – you only lose 5 if you’re stoned. It also takes 23 minutes to regain focus after an interruption.
Our attention is the product
Social media algos are designed to feed their surveillance capitalism business models – our attention is the product. Algos have found that “if it enrages it engages” and that’s what’s prioritised in feeds – leading to increased anxiety and polarisation. This has a massive negative impact on all of us – but especially young people… and democracy.
There’s hope and it requires action.
He used the example of the group of mums in the 80s who campaigned to get lead removed from petrol, which was a key ingredient harming everyone but especially kids’ brains while they were developing. We need to get rid of the surveillance capitalism models which are a key harmful ingredient and driving addiction and stolen focus.
While doing that, we can also take personal action with our habits to get more sleep, take steps to control how we use our screens – and especially social media, and design for deep work to get into flow state with uninterrupted blocks of time.
Putting together your Personal Wellbeing Plan can really help with this.
How will you protect your attention and focus?
