Step Away from the Screen

The Demise of “Focus”

By Regan Barr with The Lukeion Project

Has this ever happened to you? You’re out to eat with friends or family, and someone whips out his phone and begins scrolling. Recently we visited a restaurant where we were seated next to a group of ten friends. By the time we left the restaurant, over half of them were staring at their electronic devices and not interacting with the group. We assumed they’d planned this outing as a “hey, let’s get together and catch up” time, but most of them weren’t really interested in catching up. They were instead being fed a constant stream of entertainment.

When was the last time you read a book cover-to-cover in under a week? …mastered a new skill, discipline, or body of knowledge? …got through an entire movie even though the first 10 minutes moved a bit slowly? If you’re like many people today, the answer might be “it’s been so long, I can’t remember.”

Lately, I’ve been noticing a lot of articles on how high school and college students have never read a single book. They’ve appeared in The Atlantic, AP News, The College Fix, and The Hechinger Report (which focuses exclusively on education-related topics). We’ve noticed the same thing in our classes at The Lukeion Project. For some students, just reading the instructions for an assignment is too big a task! This is a sad commentary on our society. We no longer exercise our imagination, like we do when reading a book; we’re just fed a constant stream of visual content.

All of these are signs of a modern ailment: we’ve lost the ability to FOCUS.

How did we arrive at this point? One of the answers is that “social media” is NOT “social.” Often, it’s just the opposite. We watch people on a screen whom we’ve never met, while ignoring the friend or family member that is in the room with us. A recent poll from Gallup found that teens spend an average of nearly 5 hours a day on social media. An article posted on Exploding Topics found that the average American checks her mobile device 159 times a day. We’ve gone well past “connected”; we’re now officially “distracted.”

Bite-sized information is now the norm, so we never get to practice focusing. We read headlines instead of articles. Editors have learned they can influence people’s opinions simply by writing a good headline. This has spawned a whole industry of people who now actually READ the article looking for bias in the headline. Sometimes there is contradictory evidence in the article itself.

So how do we begin to rebuild focus?

1. Disconnect from the electronic world. You might be surprised at what your mind can do when you’re not connected to your TV or phone. Try having a real conversation. Ask your children if they learned anything that surprised them today. Have a game night with the family. Perhaps have a “reading hour” where your entire family agrees to read (a book printed on paper!) for at least an hour. And make sure everyone gets through their book.
2. Go outside and connect with nature. Take a hike. Go to the zoo. Go to a park. Buy some goats. Do some gardening. Take your dog for a walk. 
3. But most important: Practice focusing. Be fully engaged at your dinner table. Take up a creative hobby that requires your full attention, like woodworking or welding. See how long you can go without checking your phone.

The people who accomplish great things have learned to focus. The future belongs to those who can focus!