DYL: From Stolen Focus to Deep Work
Details
In this month’s Design Your Life meetup, we will treat attention as a design problem rather than a personal failing. Our discussion draws on Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, which argues that external systems, especially the attention economy, constant task switching, sleep loss, and environments hostile to deep work, steal our ability to concentrate. The book identifies twelve drivers of the crisis and frames them as concrete levers for change.
We will focus on practices and reforms grounded in the book: protecting sleep, rebuilding long form reading and single tasking, shaping daily rhythms that enable flow, reducing fragmenting cues such as notifications, feeds, and tabs, and making room for mind wandering and rest. We will also consider collective steps Hari highlights, rethinking platform incentives and reshaping work and school norms to safeguard uninterrupted time.
Reading the book is helpful, but not required to join the discussion.
Summary Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again
https://tinyurl.com/bdtjpf5h
Stolen Focus by Johann Hari: 8 Minute Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=623n1v6dkDQ