You can’t concentrate and it sucks.
I was like that too. I still am sometimes, to be honest. Everyone struggles with paying attention sometimes. Some more often than others.
I grew up in the 80s, before the internet and smartphones. By all accounts, I had a reasonably good attention span. I got good grades, enjoyed writing, read a lot, and watched a crapload of cartoons.
But then, later in life, something changed. I can point to the rise of social media and smartphones and app stores as key culprits in this shift.
These technologies tapped into my dopamine system like nothing else, and I became hooked. On swiping and scrolling. On the pings and dings. On the neverending new and novel.
At the time, this didn’t seem at all harmful. It was actually really enjoyable. (Dopamine, after all, is quite literally designed to be enjoyable.)
But this was the start of my attentional decline.
My behaviour was being altered, over months then years. Whereas before I could read physical books for long stretches, now I was only reading shorter articles online. Then only scanning them. Then just reading the headlines.
The internet was shallowing me: transforming my brain to prefer skimming and scrolling over deeper contemplation. Compelling me to read and think at surface level. To always be on the lookout for the next new thing to jump to.
All day long I was rapidly shifting my attention from one object to another.
As an entrepreneur running my own businesses, I had a lot of responsibilities and I struggled more and more to maintain them. Paying attention in meetings became hard. Typing responses to emails turned into lengthy and painful endeavours.
At first I assumed external distractions were the sole problem. Startups are chaotic at the best of times — and with the rise of Slack, Zoom, open offices and the like, it felt impossible to get work done.
Bombarded with notifications from others through technology and by technology itself, I was drowning. I thought, If I can just carve out some space — some silence — I’ll finally be able to work on the important things that require concentration.
But even when I was able to find an hour here and there to do deeply focused work, I still couldn’t do the work. My mind was racing and buzzing. My eyes darted all over.
And, in what was the strangest experience, after a few minutes of focus I’d impulsively refresh my email. Or check Slack. I had this ongoing urge to check the very technology that I was blaming for my inability to concentrate.
It was insane. I was my own distraction.
I was massively overstimulated. And it was holding me back.
My attention was a liability. I reminisced often about that calm life I had known pre-internet.
How did I let things get to this point? And in a world of big tech spending billions hacking my attention, could I get better?
I spent the next few years finding out.
I read everything I could about attention and how it works. I studied dopamine and how it affects attention.
I tried numerous techniques to reduce my dependence on technology while introducing more analog into my life.
I studied meditation and eastern philosophy.
And I discovered some things:
- My declining attention span wasn’t my fault. We’re in a war for attention. Massive corporations are spending trillions of dollars to harvest it with superstimuli.
- Concentration is a skill that can be improved — and the only way to improve a skill is with practice.
- Technology and AI aren’t the answer to better attention.
- Just deciding to concentrate isn’t enough. It’s not about willpower. I needed a system to follow.
- Lots of people have written about the importance of focus, but few have detailed exactly how to do it.
I read about the concept of deep work and used it as my starting point to regain control of my attention (and, I hoped, my life).
I treated my deep work sessions like going to the gym, performing concentration calisthenics on my cranium.
My initial goal was to work for 30 minutes straight, once per week, without getting distracted.
Which proved… quite impossible for me.
But as I introduced other tools and techniques I learned, it slowly became doable.
Soon I was doing an hour a day a few times a week. Then three hours, five days a week.
And the output was incredible. I was getting more done in three hours than I used to in an entire workweek.
And I discovered that by focusing on doing deep work, I developed the attentional capacities to help me thrive in other areas of work.
I could pay attention in meetings again. I could listen better, write and think more clearly, and be comfortable sitting with hard problems for longer periods of time.
Most of all, my days just felt more calm. No, that’s not quite right. My mind felt more calm. Sure, there were still stressful times that caused some anxiety — but my internal baseline was now calm rather than chaos.
It’s how I remembered feeling before the internet.
But the real secret about improving my concentration at work is how it transcended work.
Being unable to pay attention in a meeting likely means you’re unable to pay attention when a loved one is talking to you at home. Checking your phone every few minutes while working probably means you’re frequently checking your phone while hanging with friends or playing with your kids.
The better habits and behaviours I developed by learning how to work deeply greatly enhanced how I paid attention to the world at large.
As I improved my own concentration, it became clear how poorly other peoples’ was.
How overstimulated everyone seemed to be. Friends and colleagues checking their phones and smartwatches in the middle of our conversations; eyes shifting around the room like they’re hopped up on some low-quality street drug.
Employees unable to sit still in meetings, anxiously checking Slack while they’re talking.
People who just can’t get done what they need to when they need to. Who are rapidly falling behind. Just like I was.
So I’m now sharing my learnings and strategies to help others.
Because this anxious inability to focus is happening to almost everyone — probably you too. And it can feel embarrassing. But it's not your fault. You're not dumb or useless. You're capable of much more. You just need to concentrate on concentration for a while.
Because attention, I learned, is the heart of all achievements and aspirations — in both work and life.
