So yeah… Everybody is saying that because of the internet and stuff our attention span is getting shorter and shorter. I don’t want that. I want to think deeply about topics and come with unbiased and good answers to questions, viewed from as many perspectives as possible.
So how do I make my attention span longer again?
That’s what I’m trying to answer, and don’t forget it (because of my short attention span and sparsely divided memory (which, obviously, accounts for memory loss, sometimes)). So by writing it down as a Medium post, I hope not to forget it. Because it seems important. Wow, haha, I think there’s a movie about this!
First of all. Why does your attention span get shorter from internet? It’s probably because of hyperlinks. At least, that’s what they say in this book (highly recommend it). The internet transforms our brains into chronic scatterbrains! Haha. Such a cool term I read in the book, I had to repeat it. In my own words (read carefully): ‘Internet provides you with an ecosystem that rewards websites that are designed in a way that promote clicking on new things. Because if you click there, it will open the endless box deeper into a direction of the designers choice. This is profitable. So because of this rule, the internet kind of rewards design towards making things look interesting. Keeping people engaged. Making people want more and more.’
This is at the very core of how internet is designed. There is just one webpage you read, but once you’ve read it, there are 10 more webpages that you want to read after it (or in between). For every webpage of those 10, there will be 10 more you need to read. The exponential growth quickly makes it impossible to read it all. This makes us feeling unfinished. We never get to the end of something because it keeps expanding forever! This is maybe why we start skimming, reading super shallowly, and start giving things less thought. It sounds quite logical, doesn’t it?
Let me give an example. Look at a Medium post. At the end of the post, Medium tells me I should clap, follow, and then read related articles. Those related articles are often very very interesting to me. So they make me click there. What happens is that I don’t go back to my thought where I came from, but I drift off instead. I click on the next interesting thing. And again. And again. 5 articles later I ran out of time and forgot why I went to Medium in the first place. Oh yeah! I wanted to write a blog about ‘How to make my attention span longer again?’ haha.
Where should I click? It’s all so interesting…
Well, if you want to make your attention span longer, there are two options:
- Be super mindful; When you go online, have a clear goal. When you achieved your goal, turn off your browser (or close your laptop) and then think what you want to do next. This is what I’ve been doing for the past months, and it’s been quite effective sometimes, but more often than not I still tend to forget I’m doing this. But at least it tends to improve my productivity a little bit! :)
- Disable all hyperlinks; Maybe this is a better option. There are lots of places on the web that diverge your thoughts onto another thread. Another topic. Something that may be very interesting indeed (so click on it quick!). So what if there were no ‘related articles’ at Medium? No ‘suggested reads’ in your email? No ‘up next’ video’s at YouTube? No next post on Facebook? I think this would be wonderful. A more goal-oriented web. A less distractive one. Please, someone, build a tool for this, and I’ll buy it
If anyone has more suggestions, please let me know and I’ll list them here later. I really want to make my attention span longer again, but I love my webbrowser too much to stop it. Any already existing tools for this?
P.S. I found these images on google searching for ‘fractals’ and ‘deep fractals’. Credit doesn’t go to me.