EP. 30: 4 Focus Killers and What You Can Do About Them

Does concentration feel like an uphill battle for you? Do you regularly suffer from brain fog or the inability to pay attention? If that’s you, take heart: this is not a personal failure on your part. Turns out, there is much you can do to reclaim your focus, if you’re willing to fight for it. This is episode 30, and today we’re kicking off season three by sharing four focus killers and what you can do about them. Listen in!

Tune in to Hear:

  • 4 things that are killing your focus and keeping you from the deep work of writing
  • 5 ways to fight back and reclaim your focus
  • How each of these killers has personally affected Sandy + Mary K. and what they’ve done to fight back
  • The difference between a maker’s schedule and a manager’s schedule and how it impacts your work

Links from the Show:

Quotes from Johann Hari’s book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again

“If you go too fast, you overload your abilities, and they degrade. But when you practice moving at a speed that is compatible with human nature—and you build that into your daily life—you begin to train your attention and focus. “That’s why those disciplines make you smarter. ” Slowness, he explained, nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.”― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again

“if you check your texts often while trying to work, you aren’t only losing the little bursts of time you spend looking at the texts—you are also losing the time it takes to refocus afterward, which can be much longer. He said: “If you’re spending a lot of your time not really thinking, but wasting it on switching, that’s just wasted brain-processing time.” This means that if your Screen Time shows you are using your phone four hours a day, you are losing much more time than that in lost focus.”― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again

“If we continue to be a society of people who are severely under-slept and overworked; who switch tasks every three minutes; who are tracked and monitored by social-media sites designed to figure out our weaknesses and manipulate them to make us scroll and scroll and scroll; who are so stressed that we become hypervigilant; who eat diets that cause our energy to spike and crash; who are breathing in a chemical soup of brain-inflaming toxins every day—then, yes, we will continue to be a society with serious attention problems.”― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again

“So if you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, you’ll make more mistakes, you’ll be less creative, and you’ll remember less of what you do.”― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again

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