Book: Stolen Focus

[elusivek]

Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention
Johann Hari
Amazon Product Link

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening—and how to get our attention back.

“The book the world needs in order to win the war on distraction.”—Adam Grant, author of Think Again

“Read this book to save your mind.”—Susan Cain, author of Quiet

SHORTLISTED FOR THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times

In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding that constantly switching from device to device and tab to tab was a diminishing and depressing way to live. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions—even abandoning his phone for three months—but nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention—and he discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong.

We think our inability to focus is a personal failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces that have left us uniquely vulnerable to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. Hari found that there are twelve deep causes of this crisis, from the decline of mind-wandering to rising pollution, all of which have robbed some of our attention. In Stolen Focus, he introduces readers to Silicon Valley dissidents who learned to hack human attention, and veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD. He explores a favela in Rio de Janeiro where everyone lost their attention in a particularly surreal way, and an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore workers’ productivity.

Crucially, Hari learned how we can reclaim our focus—as individuals, and as a society—if we are determined to fight for it. Stolen Focus will transform the debate about attention and finally show us how to get it back.

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Alright, I went ahead and tried a fourth audiobook (actually this is my fourth, but the third that I actually finished and am writing about)... another funny consequence was that, just before I started this book (when I just finished the previous audiobook), I was wondering "you really can't 'read' a book by listening to it, you can't retain information that way!"

Hey, this book covers that.

I was also actually wondering why people liked audiobooks so much. I had always thought that if I were to listen to an audiobook (and podcasts, radio shows, etc), you really can't multi task, because you are paying attention to what is being said. And I really had to pay attention to the audiobook, I basically couldn't do anything that needed mind function. I couldn't even do any serious filing at work, because I had to read what the document is about in order to decide where to file it to.

It was also a little harder to hold and retain information longer while listening to this. I was in agreement in many parts of the book, but now I can't really tell you what I was in agreement with.

I did notice the book bringing up the same arguments twice (something about animals in a zoo) but I can't tell you word for word.

And it's a little ironic that I chose this book to listen to when this is about focusing on a task but I really couldn't focus on just listening to this. I might have had better focus reading this.

oh but I have to say I was seriously envious of the author when he mentioned being sent to the Swiss Alps for the summer when he was 9 but being served food that he didn't recognize... I was so.... "it's good foooooooood. Eeeeeaaaattt ittttttt!" And brought on pleasant memories of when I was taken to Austria the couple of times.