How to Get Your Attention Back

I’m halfway through my Digital Declutter, and I’ve settled into it now. You know how, when you lose your smartphone and temporarily have to use a dumbphone, you actually end up finding it fairly restful? This has been like that. It helps that these days the change is largely cosmetic – most of my life is lived offline anyway.

It has also led to some conversations with friends about how to have this restfulness (or to be more accurate about it, distractionless-ness) more of the time. I have friends who tell me they can’t focus on things more than five minutes at a time, that they find themselves unable to read books anymore, that they can’t sit for too long without looking at their phones, but who think a full-blown social media fast is untenable for them.

Now, I agree with Cal Newport that you don’t know what you really need vs. what you just feel you need until you actually give it up for a while. But regardless, there are things you can do while continuing to use a smartphone that can help you get your attention back.

The key thing to understand is that attention isn’t something you achieve via willpower, it’s something you gain from control of the environment – at least, I find it easier that way. The thing you’re paying attention to has to command your attention, which means there can’t be other things vying for it at that moment. The idea is to remove choices you don’t want yourself making.

Everything on this list proceeds from this principle, and the assumption that you want to spend high-attention time on high-quality things rather than low-attention time on low-quality things.

1. Remove needless apps from your phone: Any social media app or an app that you can get lost in – that doesn’t perform a function other than allowing you to scroll – shouldn’t be on your phone. Keep them on your computer, or an iPad that lives in a specific part of your house – somewhere you have to go actively to access the apps. I also don’t have email on my phone. The pandemic made me realise that no deadline is so sacrosanct that I have to sacrifice the rest of my life for it. But let’s say you have to have email accessible because you need it, then proceed to #2.
2. Turn off notifications: My phone notifies me about calls and urgent messages, and that’s about it. Assuming you still have these apps, if you have to see anything else – Twitter DMs, Instagram DMs, email – you need to go into the app. It’s stressful at first, and you’ll probably be checking your email more frequently for a bit, but then you’ll find yourself happy that you’re not being told every time someone’s reached out to you. Most messaging is meant to be asynchronous – very few people actually need you right now, and if they do, they can call.
3. Leave your phone at the door: I don’t take my phone into the bedroom with me. I got a cheap phone holder that’s velcroed to the bedroom doorframe, and every night when I’m going to bed, I turn off my WiFi and phone data (so when I wake up, there aren’t tens of messages waiting for me – I turn on the WiFi once I’ve sat down with my coffee) and put the phone there. I got this idea from someone telling me a long time ago that if you work from home, you should have a designated place to work and when you’re away from that, you shouldn’t be working. Helps you psychologically feel like the rest of your house is a place of rest. So my bedroom is a place where I don’t have to think about the world.
4. Do one thing at a time: Don’t listen to music while reading, don’t look at your phone while watching a movie. Partly, this is out of respect for artistic work – it deserves your full attention (and if it doesn’t, why are you watching it?) – but it’s a better way to engage with time. Doing one thing at a time allows that thing to take over for the duration, and for its ending to be discreet. You’ll feel like you’re doing more things, and less like your hours run together into an amorphous blob.
5. Schedule boredom/idleness: Schedule unstructured time when you’re sitting/walking and thinking without external input. No music, no podcasts. No input from other minds. In fact …
6. Schedule every minute: The idea might seem oppressive, but it’s in fact incredibly freeing. If you know what you’re doing throughout your day, it means you’ve chosen to do that proactively, rather than just reacting to ambient stimulus, and this includes your unstructured time. I use the Time Block Planner, because it allows me to schedule every waking hour, but flexibly. You can change your mind about your day at any time, but it’s good to have a plan in place.
7. Designate time for social media: Check your social media at specific times rather than just whenever. This includes your email. One of my worst habits over time has been to just keep my email app open in the background while I’m working. This is horrible for focus, and I’m glad my digital declutter made me stop doing this. You can designate a social media check every hour, or even every half hour if you really feel like it, but do it in that time and then walk away. You’ll want to do it less.
8. Keep books everywhere: Around 2021-2022, when I felt like I was spending too much time on social media and wasn’t reading nearly the number of books that I wanted to, this is what I did. A book in the living room, the office, the bedroom. A book on every device – the iPad, the phone, wherever. Every time I’d want to check social media, I’d open a book instead. Every time I was waiting for a friend, open a book on my phone. Audiobooks when I was driving. I don’t do it this intensely anymore, because I don’t need to, but it worked.
9. Don’t binge tv: This is, honestly, a corollary for #4 – because what it means is that do one thing at a time, and then stop. Don’t let things run into each other. Watch an episode, watch the next one the next day. Take your music app off autoplay mode. Listen to an album of music, and then stop. You can put on another album then, one you chose.
10. Go on walks without your phone: Proceeds from #5, but bears repeating.
11. Do less, but better: If you want to spend high-attention time on high-quality things, you will necessarily have to do fewer things. This applies to your choice of work, entertainment and general activities.

Apply these at your discretion. You might find some of these difficult – I trust your judgment. You might be making excuses about others. That’s okay, you can try again later. Doing some of these will enable you to do more of them. There’s rarely any point beating yourself up about this stuff. And there’s particularly no point telling me in an email or comment why one of these doesn’t apply to you.

In practice, I don’t manage all of these things all of the time. (For example, I’d find it impossible to do the dishes without music or a podcast.) Different times need different solutions, sometimes you just can’t do things you feel you should be doing. Sometimes your brain just isn’t working and you need to binge-watch a sitcom or scroll Reddit. But I manage 80-90% of these on a good day, and 40-60% on a bad day, which isn’t too shabby.

Hope these help, and more suggestions are welcome.