Francois Lachance
I am a bit puzzled by the conclusion (it is the sandwiching of "reckoning" between "rebuilding" and "retraining" that has me pondering) :
Rebuilding my attention span in this sense might be more a matter of reckoning with my real priorities than retraining my brain to do one thing at a time.
On Distraction
For a host of reasons, I had to put Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals down for a couple of weeks; there was the post-Thanksgiving crush at work, and then travel for a family event, and then travel for a conference, and then a big announcement about a big project, and then, and then, and then. But I picked it back up this afternoon, and just tripped on this passage and fell flat on my face:
Most other resources on which we rely as individuals—such as food, money, and electricity—are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life. Seen this way, “distraction” needn’t refer only to momentary lapses in focus, as when you’re distracted from performing your work duties by the ping of an incoming text message, or a compellingly terrible news story. The job itself could be a distraction—that is, an investment of a portion of your attention, and therefore of your life, in something less meaningful than other options that might have been available to you.
I will only say here that I have spent the better part of the last few months deep in a fret about what I want to be when I grow up, and this hits right at the heart of it. There's the thing I'm trying so hard to build, and there's the thing that brings tangible rewards. There's the thing that I'm most passionate about, and there's the thing that supports my community. There's the thing that could with a lot of effort and a bit of luck turn out to be a huge success, and there's the thing that serves as its own indicator of success.
Burkeman is forcing me to realize that no small part of the strain I've been feeling of late is resulting from my trying to have it both ways, trying to keep all my options open, trying to avoid having a path not taken. But each option demands my attention in a way that can only prove a distraction from the others, and the others do not let up in their demands in the meantime.
So the challenge ahead in the new year is, I think, to figure out where I want to place my focus, what might be most meaningful for my life -- and then to find ways to make peace with the distractions, whether by compartmentalizing them or by letting them go entirely. It's not easy: many of those distractions have real appeal. But if they're not the thing I most want to do, that appeal might well have the same effect on me as an evening spent doom-scrolling. Rebuilding my attention span in this sense might be more a matter of reckoning with my real priorities than retraining my brain to do one thing at a time.
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