Did you know that the mere presence of a smartphone near you is slowly draining away your cognitive energy and attention? (Even if it’s tucked away in a desk drawer or a bag.) Like it or not, the persistent use of technology is changing the quality of our attention. And not in a good way.
In this episode, I talk with writer, designer and technologist Craig Mod — who’s done numerous experiments in reclaiming his attention — about how we can break out of this toxic cycle of smartphone and social media addiction and regain control of our powers of concentration.
Key takeaways from the interview:
- How Facebook and other social media apps are lulling us into “attention slavery”
- Why interrupting your workflow to post on social media — and sharing pithy thoughts or ideas — shuts down your creative process
- How short digital detox retreats and/or meditation sessions can “defrag your mind” so that you can deploy your attention more consciously and more powerfully
- Why mapping your ideas in large offline spaces — e.g. on a whiteboard or blackboard — gives you “permission” to get messy and evolve your thinking in a way that’s impossible on a screen
- How changing the quality of your attention can change your relationship to everything — art, conversations, creativity, and business
Go Deeper
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Favorite Quotes
“If there was a meter of 1 to 10 of how present you are or how much you can manipulate your own attention — how confident you are that you could, say, read a book for three hours without an interruption, without feeling pulled to something else. I would say the baseline pre-smartphone was a 4 or 3. Now, it’s a 1.”
“I think that a life in which you are never present, in which you have no control over your attention, in which you’re constantly being pulled in different directions, is kind of sad — because there is this incredible gift of consciousness. And when that consciousness is deployed smartly, it’s amazing the things that can be built out of it.”
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Resources
Here’s a shortlist of things Craig and I talked about in the course of the conversation, including where you can go on a meditation retreat. You should be aware that vipassana retreats are offered free of charge, and are open to anyone.
- Craig’s piece on attention from Backchannel magazine
- Vipassana meditation retreat locations
- Craig’s article on post-100 hours of meditation
- Film director Krzysztof Kieslowski
- Writer and technologist Kevin Kelly
- The Large Hadron Collider at Cern
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