June 4th, 2012

Great presentation by Joe Kraus on the Culture of Distraction and how we’re all training ourselves to be less able to focus on any one thing. STOP WHAT YOUR DOING AND WATCH IT NOW.

My take? I think I’ll develop a training program that works the opposite way. Over a year ago in a post titled How the Internet is affecting my attention span and how I’m planning on fixing it I wrote:

We are probably all suffering from this trend. So how am I going to conquer it? Simple; practice. I’m going to retrain my attention span. I’m going to sit down with something – a book, a project, maybe even some time for meditation – and spend 30 minutes with it. Then, I’ll progress from there.

I did manage to regain a lot of my attention span by simply striving to focus on any one thing for a period. Also in that post I remark that deadlines may help with focus also. If you have to have something done by a certain time you’ll focus long enough to get it done.

I’m going to make this a weekly feature here on the blog. How I’m going to recapture my attention. You can follow along under the attention span tag.

/via Matt Mullenweg.