Though I don’t engage in social media, like the people Hari describes, I feel driven to jump from one task to another every few minutes - writing a book review, but then stopping to wash the dishes, telling myself to clean the basement but then settling down with a glass of wine on the front porch.Įarly on in his book, Hari writes “Through no fault of your own, there never seems to be enough stillness - enough cool, clear space - for you to stop and think.” I live a life of solitude, for the most part, and should have plenty of “cool, clear space,” yet that observation struck home with me. While reading these pages, I was nodding in agreement, knowing that I too was one of those who, for instance, skims articles on the internet rather than absorbing them. He gives example after example of our vanished talent for deep reading, of being unable to stick with tasks for more than a few minutes, of children lacking the power to apply themselves to their school lessons. “Starved of flow, we become stumps of ourselves, sensing somewhere we might have been.For nearly the entire book, Johann Hari focuses our attention on our inability to pay attention. The flow state, focusing for long, enjoyable stretches, is essential to creativity, he says, to living well.

The flow state doesn’t happen by chance we need to choose a single goal and push ourselves to the edge of our abilities in executing it. It may be a climber inching up a rock face, a painter starting on a canvas, or someone learning to ride a bicycle.

Most of us have experienced it at some stage: when we are so absorbed in a task that time seems to melt away and we lose all sense of ourselves. Hari describes the mindset we should be aiming for - the “flow state”.

If you are constantly being interrupted while you work - a quick check of Twitter, a glance at an Instagram notification - you are losing the time it takes to refocus, and that is swallowing up a lot of your working day, and effectiveness. When you turn your attention back to what you were doing, after it has been interrupted, it takes 20 minutes for your brain to reconfigure. Our brains, scientists say, are not designed for this. At the root of the attention crisis is the ceaseless switching we do throughout the day, responding to prompts, calls, emails, and texts, scanning information as quickly as we can, listening with half an ear as another part of our brain is busy planning something else.

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