Thanks to this blog post by Filipe Donadio, which gave me this new template for book reviews, which led me to write 850 words.

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

Johann Hari methodically explains many different ways in which the structure of modern society erodes our ability to sustain focus, both on individual tasks and at the grander level of living a “focused life”. These include environmental factors (e.g., air pollution & our processed food diets), technological factors (e.g., reading ephemeral text on screens instead of persistent text on physical pages), and economics factors (e.g., the profitability of distracted, stressed, and exhausted consumers). The structure of the text is refreshingly well done, the arguments are presented plainly and thoroughly, and the author adds personal color to the research findings in a fair, responsible way.

👀 How I Discovered It

I discovered this book when I heard him on an episode of Andrew Sullivan’s podcast. Johann Hari is super playful and fun to listen to, which definitely comes through in his writing. It helps that I heard the podcast first! I think I would’ve been more irritated with his casual writing style if I wasn’t familiar with how he speaks first.

That’s not to say that the research or the argument in the book is lackadaisical. In fact, it’s one of the most well-organized and responsibly presented books I’ve ever read; Hari’s background as a journalist certainly shines through. He was meticulous about presenting counter-arguments to the research he shared, and goes as far to say things like “I will be presenting the arguments against this research in the next chapter, so as you’re reading, please remember that these findings are disputed”. I was thoroughly impressed by this element of the book.

🎨 Impressions

Overall, this book hits like An Inconvenient Truth for attention deficit. After reading, I was left with the “oh my goodness, what a nearly insurmountable problem this is” feeling that I’ve only ever experienced before with books & movies about climate change.

After finishing the book, my imagination fast-forwards American future to the set of Idiocracy, with bad food, air pollution, and advertising having totally eroded our ability to hold jobs or collectively undertake social projects.

Unlike An Inconvenient Truth, however, Hari doesn’t provide the relief of saying that the answer to our problems lie in incremental fixes made by individuals. In fact, one of the reasons the problem of unfocused attention seems so dire after reading the book is because ,throughout it, Hari demonstrates again and again how the issues are structural, and not based on the bad habits of individual people.

He spends some time naming this distinction, in fact: he calls it “cruel optimism” when you ask someone to “just” feed their children better food, or “just” stop looking at your phone so much, or “just” breath cleaner air. He has a virtuous awareness throughout the book that suggesting these one-off solutions will only benefit people with means.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

That being said, learning about attention deficit issues in society has made me crave greater focus, and as such it’s caused me to make a few personal habit changes:

  1. I’ve started keeping a small memo notebook in my pocket to jot down notes and questions, so that I’m not pulling out my phone to do something with every thought or Google search that pops into my head.
  2. I’ve started “time blocking” my time at work, scheduling out each hour of the day. This allows me to focus on one thing at a time, and allows me to set aside certain chunks of time for email correspondence. Knowing I have an hour set aside for email later in the day helps keep me from compulsively checking it when I have other more important things to do.
  3. I’ve stopped bring my iPhone/iPad to the gym, and turned into my “unplug” time. I’ve switched over to an old iPod shuffle, and using that same notebook – instead of an app – to record my weight training. This habit change has had the biggest net-positive benefit to my day; I now come back from the gym feeling refreshed, relaxed, and centered.

🙋 Who Should Read It?

This is a great self-improvement/productivity/mindful awareness book for anyone who doesn’t have time for all the regular productivity-movement bullshit.

✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

“The more information you take in, the less time you can spend processing any individual piece of it”

“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. […] Slowness nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.”

“losing your [sense of purpose] is “the deepest form of distraction,” and you may even begin ‘decohering.’ This is when you stop making sense to yourself, because you don’t have the mental space to create a story about who you are. You become obsessed with petty goals, or dependent on simplistic signals from the outside world like retweets. You lose yourself in a cascade of distractions. You can only find your [sense of purpose] if you have sustained periods of reflection, mind-wandering, and deep thought.”