One of the challenges of contemporary life is dealing with distraction and knowing how to regain control over our attention. When bored or procrastinating I can easily turn to social media but what happens as that becomes a habit is that I slowly begin to lose the ability to concentrate and to be able to do work that requires concentration, focus, thought and depth. I also note that while at the end of each week that I have not necessarily invested my time into the things I would like to invest and am therefore not being or becoming the kind of person I would like to be. In other words, if you are constantly distracted you will not grow in the ways you would like and therefore mastery over your attention is a component of discipleship. It’s about growth.

There are all sorts of reasons to really think about your use of social media and in what way you want to give it your attention. Remember your attention puts money in Mark Zuckerberg’s pockets so it’s a valuable commodity. You shouldn’t give it away cheaply. You might be aware of social media’s general trend to the negative and divisiveness. You might want to rethink how your time is organised. You might just feel like your digital life is a little out of control and want to declutter it.

In this whole area of life, you’ll probably notice among all the books you could read on the subject, one author’s name crop up over and over again, Cal Newport. He’s the author of books such as Digital Minimalism and Deep Work¹. He has become something of the focus guru and there’s some real wisdom here. He essentially offers three steps to think through to get a better handle on your attention, to stop giving it to things you don’t want and give it to things you do (I’m borrowing some of the brilliant Jason Ramasami’s illustrations on this. Or find them on Twitter).

Step 1: Give Your Brain Some Breathing Room

The anxious uncertainty of the pandemic, combined with social and political unrest, combined with an information landscape dominated by a tribalized social media, is breaking us. Our days are fragmented by a fast drip of insistently panicked content that wrings anxiety, outrage, and fear from our autonomic nervous systems until we’re left exhausted and emotionally dry.

If you’ll excuse the understatement: this is not good.

It is with these observations in mind that I think a fitting place to start Focus Week is with an urgent plea to unplug — to allow the fragments of your attention to coalesce back into meaningful stretches of presence, and your emotions to re-stabilize. You cannot reclaim a life of focus until you reclaim your brain from the distractions that have ensnared it in recent months.

https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/08/25/focus-week-give-your-brain-some-breathing-room/

Step 2: Rediscover Depth

It’s important to emphasize that this commitment is no indulgence. You cannot exist in a persistent state of agitated distraction. A regular dose of depth will do more than provide you a fleeting moment of calm, it will begin a more lasting process of rewiring your brain back toward a state of concentration, and insight, and creativity that’s much more compatible with a satisfying and meaningful life, even in times of struggle.

https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/08/27/focus-week-rediscover-depth/

Step 3: Take Control of Your Time

Escaping from the noise of a distracted world and becoming reacquainted with the pleasures of presence and concentration are crucial preconditions to a focused life. To achieve this state in full, however, ultimately requires that you take the final step of actually focusing your attention with intention and purpose.

https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/08/29/focus-week-take-control-of-your-time

1. If you buy one of these books after clicking this link, I’ll get a small commission which I’ll use to buy books [↩]