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James Kwak, bestselling co-author of two books about the financial crisis, 13 Bankers and White House Burning, recently wrote a column for Bull Market titled “How I Achieved Peace by Crippling My Phone.”
When the smartphone was invented, Kwak says, it was sold as a productivity tool, but the increase in productivity has mostly turned out to be an illusion: “What we’ve done is take the Internet’s immense potential for distraction — once confined to a computer with a network connection — and package it in a form that is always less than three seconds away.”
Kwak concedes that the smartphone is an incredibly powerful tool. But, he says, “I know that its enormous powers of distraction also make me lose focus at work, tune out in meetings, stay up too late at night, and, worst of all, ignore people in the same room with me.”
Instead of giving up his smartphone, Kwak decided to cripple it: he removed everything on it that could be distracting. In his case, that meant deleting or disabling email apps, Twitter, Facebook, the full suite of Google apps, Kindle, YouTube, and most importantly, both web browsers.
“When I’m not working,” Kwak says, “I want to be able to focus on the people and things around me. Every moment counts, as a wise person said. I found that, for me, that means I can’t have the accumulated knowledge of the world three seconds away all the time.”
The word distract derives from a Latin word meaning to drag away. It suggests that we should be attending to something that’s in front of us, but something else is dragging us away. If we spend most of our hours and days being dragged away from where we are, we will never actually focus on what we ought to focus on.
Most of us, however, seem to like having the accumulated knowledge of the world at my fingertips. In this sense, the smartphone may be the talisman of the 21st century. Or maybe it’s the string of worry beads. In either case, it can certainly be distracting.
Two years ago, a study found that smartphone users look at their devices 150 times per day, or about once every six minutes. Because many people thought this finding preposterous, a different organization repeated the study last year. The updated answer was 220 times per day, or about once every four minutes. An article in The New York Times cites research showing that young people today spend so much time looking into screens that they are losing the ability to read nonverbal communications and learn other skills necessary for one-on-one interactions.
Alan Jacobs, a technology columnist for The Atlantic and author of The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, wrote a column on what it means to live in a world increasingly constituted by technology. He says, “Everything begins with attention.” The principal issue posed by technology is not how productive we are, nor how much knowledge we have at hand, nor how fully we can be entertained, nor how efficiently we can complete the tasks before us. Rather, he suggests, we need to confront how technology influences — and perhaps even takes charge of — our attention. “To ‘pay’ attention is not a metaphor,” he insists. “We should evaluate our investments of attention at least as carefully and critically as our investments of money.”
To ask how I spend my time focuses mainly on me, as though I am independent of the people and world around me. To ask how I invest my attention, on the other hand, focuses on how I engage with the people and world around me. On these terms, the issue isn’t so much what I’m doing as it is what I’m paying attention to — and what I’m getting back in return.
It may take me 15 minutes to walk to work, but what am I paying attention to during that time? I may spend 45 minutes on the treadmill, but what am I paying attention to during that time? I may spend 30 minutes at the dinner table with my family, but what am I paying attention to during that time?
When we ask ourselves these questions, we realize two things: most of us aren’t very good at paying attention, and we’re certainly not good at paying attention to what we’re paying attention to — or noticing what we’re not paying attention to. Maybe someone should send us an attention statement each month, along the lines of the bank’s monthly cash statement, so we could see how we had invested our attention during the month. And then we could decide whether we had invested our attention wisely and whether the returns met our expectations.
In her poem “The Summer Day,” the contemporary American poet Mary Oliver asks: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Her point is that every moment counts. Pay attention to what’s around you, especially the people. It’s what we ought to do with our one wild and precious life.
