DavidGoodman.Net

This is a post that I wrote on a Metafilter thread about focus while reading, which I thought might also make a good post here. The poster asked how to create and maintain focus on their reading, and wondered aloud what was causing it. I immediately thought of my own attention-destroyer - the web itself.

I’ve found in the last couple of years that regular web use has pretty much smashed my attention span into tiny, tiny bits. This is a relatively recent phenomenon - I’ve been a web user for over ten years, and used it heavily for about five. I can sum up what’s destroyed my attention span in a handy acronym:

RSS

The constant drip-drip-drip of RSS makes the web a non-static, ever changing source of information, and makes it exponentially easier to stay glued to it. Five years ago, I’d log on at most once per day, often going without for days at a time. Then I got Bloglines, and latterly Google Reader, and now I can see, in close to real-time, when and how things are being updated. For sites like MeFi with a high update rate, that’s killer (in a bad way). I’ve slowly pruned my RSS feeds of the high-volume, short length, low value feeds (the Engadgets and BoingBoings of the world) in favour of MeFi and sites which publish relatively long pieces.

However, these pieces are still generally short in the grand scheme of things. A couple of thousand words from Bruce Schneier is awesome, but I miss being able to sit down with any book and get a lot out of it, fiction or non-fiction. I mean, really, six or seven years ago I was a two-books-a-week type. Now I’m lucky if I get through one a month. And I know exactly where that time has gone - web surfing. For a while now I’ve been considering junking RSS entirely, and going cold turkey on the web at large, because I really, really don’t want to wake up in my mid-forties and have spent twenty years punching F5 like a rat in a lab for what is, in essence, pretty ephemeral stuff.

General tips that I’ve found work even despite my small-invertebrate-like attention span?

• Good light (I sit by the door in bright sunlight).
• Good seating - get a good reading chair, and a lamp for the evening.
• Don’t read in bed if you can help it, you’ll drift off.
• Turn off the TV, radio and any other background noise (although nice music can really help if you have the ’silent room’ issue, which I’m convinced for many is a mental block created by memories of trying to study in school libraries in their youth).
• Have a glass of water at hand to still the ‘make a cup of tea/coffee/whatever’ instinct.
• I also like the ideas presented about using a notebook to record what I see as the ‘Google Twitch’. Constant exposure to the web makes it very easy to develop the habit of instantly acting on any mental question or query, in part because of ease of accessibility (why wouldn’t you look up the answer?) and partly because of the fear, whether conscious or not, that you’ll forget the question if you don’t act on it instantly. This is a valid fear in the kind of mind that RSS create - a constant river of new content. It’s less of a risk in slower, longer form discursive thought, but the notepad will be a handy crutch.

Since writing this post, I’ve gone through the sixty five plus feeds I was tracking and grabbed the ten or fifteen websites I spend 80% of my time on, copied them to a Bookmarks folder on the toolbar and wiped my Google Reader subscriptions list. Now I have a ‘Daily Tabs’ folder of regularly updated, interesting stuff, and a slightly bigger folder of ‘Weekly Reads’ with the low-volume, longer length stuff.

Let’s see how it works out. Do you feel your attention span getting shorter? Did you even make it to the end of this article?