How to increase your attention span
The Studio Edit: your weekly curated, not calculated, curiosity feed
Welcome to The Studio Edit. A weekly newsletter with my recommended essays, articles and long form media on a particular subject in your inbox every Sunday.
This week’s theme is all about how to increase your attention span. We all know how it goes: ping goes the phone, ping goes Teams, Slack, your watch, the oven - anything and everything pings at us distracting us from whatever we were doing, whether that was watching a movie, a conversation or reading a book. We can silence the phone, the watch and close the laptop but now we are distracted so we may as well pick up our phones and scroll for a while. Next thing you know, an entire hour has gone by.
Last week’s Studio Edit touched on the declining rate of young people enjoying reading for pleasure. This week, The Economist asked whether this decline is making politics dumber noting how the length of parliamentary speeches have contracted by a third over the last decade.
That might sound worrying, but shorter prose it’s always bad prose. George Orwell argued in his classic essay, Politics and the English Language, that much of political writing is unnecessarily long precisely to avoid clarity. He warned that:
the whole tendency of modern prose is away from simplicity. Instead of being a means of expressing thought, it has become a substitute for thought
Political language, he said, often hides behind “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness”- a way to defend the indefensible. In order words: cutting the fluff can sharpen the real meaning.
OK, so if shorter is sometimes good - why am I talking about it in the context of a declining attention span? Well, alongside the contracting length of political speeches, The Economist also found that the average sentence across the New York Times bestseller list has also shortened by a third since the 1930s. Adding to this, Elif Shafak recently said she shortens her Ted Talks because people just don’t have the attention span to watch a video for 19 minutes.
This trend toward fast facts could lead to a decline in “political sophistication” according to The Economist. That isn’t a far stretch considering the current geopolitical landscape we are already in.
So what other impacts could a collective declining attention span have? Could the art of discourse decline? If we cannot listen to someone for 19 minutes on a Ted Talk, what does this mean for education? What does this mean for critical analysis which needs time for thoughts to formulate?
If like me, this scares you(!) then here are some very helpful essays I came across with some tips and tricks on how we can fight against the decline:
- ’s how to fix your attention span is a fantastic read with some great suggestions: my favourite being “follower thinkers not influencers”
- ’s How to Strengthen Your Attention in a Distracted World treats your attention stamina just like your leg day in the gym complete with reps and sets!
The New York Times A Surprising (and Easy) Way to Boost your Attention Span advocates getting out in nature for a walk when you feel a bit sluggish to get your brain re-fired and ready to go!
I hope you found this week’s round up of essays illuminating - I would love to hear your thoughts on how you boost your attention span in the comments!