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How to Get Your Attention Span Back
Mark Manson’s ‘Attention Diet’ is a step-by-step program for reclaiming your focus
In the time it took me to outline this article, I checked Twitter three times and my inbox twice. I responded to four emails. I checked Slack once and sent two texts. I went down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos. Every few minutes, I refreshed Amazon to see if the ranking of my books had changed.
This should have been 20 minutes of work, tops. Yet the cost of these compulsive interruptions goes way beyond the added amount of time that it took me to finish the damn thing. These distractions interrupted my train of thought, likely reducing the quality of my writing and necessitating more edits and revisions. They created anxiety as I spent much of my distracted time anxious about the fact that I wasn’t working and my working time anxious that I was missing out on text conversations, email threads, or news updates. They made the process of writing less enjoyable and more taxing.
These types of distractions aren’t just unproductive, they’re anti-productive. They create more work than they replace.
Chances are you go through this do-si-do yourself on the regular. For me, it’s only gotten worse as time has gone on — which is strange because you’d assume that my attention span and focus would be getting stronger as I get older.
I started blogging in 2007. I remember it being easy to plop down in my chair and churn out a 1,000-word draft. I’d just wake up and do it, and then go get breakfast. But somewhere around 2013, I noticed I was interrupting myself to check Facebook or email a lot more frequently. Around 2015, I started to see it as a problem.
Suddenly, I had to pay attention to my attention. I didn’t know how to not distract myself anymore. It felt like I was living in some kind of digital hellscape, where the process of doing anything significant and important seemed impossible.
How we got to this point
I didn’t arrive there on my own. There was a point in the not-too-distant past where what we think of as “work” underwent a massive shift, as the modern economies of the 20th century moved many people out of factories and fields and into…
