Many of us grew up with a computer or a phone in our homes. They opened a world of possibilities, there is nothing like the thrill of streaming the newest song on Spotify and listening to it multiple times. Or building your own playlist and proudly showing it to other people. They connected us through iMessage and WhatsApp, for the first time you could talk with your friends after school. As technology advanced, computers and phones started to substitute many of the devices in our homes. They became our music player, our gaming center, and increasingly the place where we do all our work.
Now in 2022, mobile devices have become the center of our social lives. Entrepreneurs have taken advantage of this trend to build Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. As we keep sharing more of our world, we’ve become more immersed in the digital one. We’ve all felt the urge of being on a dinner table and checking our messages, or going out for a walk and getting a notification from a news app. To remain constantly connected we’ve come to sacrifice our ability to focus and be present with each other.
In the book Stolen Focus, Johan Hari argues that our ability to focus is damaged by how we use our phones and computers. He says that being distracted is like trying to drive a car with mud in its windshields. To drive anywhere, you first need to clear the mud and decide where you want to go. Being constantly distracted prevents us from reflecting on our goals and deciding what to do about them. Until we build a conscious relationship with these technologies, the author says it can be hard to remain focused on a single task long enough to accomplish our goals.
The first problem with focusing is that there’s more information everywhere now. A research team[1] found that in 2013 people spent about 17.5 hours on a given subject, by 2016 it had dropped to 11.9 hours. Suggesting that we’re focusing for shorter times on each topic.
A hypothesis for this is that there’s more information available everywhere now. When you flood a system with more information people have less time to focus on any individual topic. Almost like “drinking from a firehose”. There’s too much information available to us at any point in time.
Another issue is our decaying attention span. Our tendency to read books for long periods of time has continuously fallen since 2004. In the American Time Use Survey[1], it was found that between 2004 and 2017 the proportion of men reading for pleasure had fallen 40 percent, while for women it was down by 29 percent. Each year at least 57 percent of Americans don’t read a single book. More shockingly, we spend on average 17 minutes a day reading a book, while 5.4 hours on our phones.
Being distracted also impairs our ability to enter a state of flow[2]. Flow is a state in which we develop a deep form of attention and “lose our sense of self and time”. This is the deepest form of focus and attention we know of. This state of flow is very fragile and can be easily interrupted by distractions. Once we’re distracted, it can take us up to 22 minutes to fall back into the same state of attention[3]. The notifications in our phones, while helpful, can prevent us from focusing for long periods of time in our tasks.
This challenge to focus has also crept into our professional work and classrooms. Cal Newport in his book “A World Without Email” argues that our workspaces are driven by what he calls a “hyperactive mind”. It is not uncommon to be trying to work and receiving sporadic notifications from email threads and slack channels we’re part of. This workflow causes us to spend a third of our working hours in our inbox, checking for new messages every six minutes.
The persistent connection with others requires us to frequently switch our attention from our work to talking about work. These “context switches” can induce a heavy cost in terms of mental energy. They can reduce our cognitive performance and create a sense of exhaustion and reduced efficacy[4].
Our current hyperactive environment might even be making us live shorter lives. In a research study, they hooked up forty people to heart rate monitors for twelve workdays. They recorded their heart rate and measured their mental stress. What they found is that the longer one spends on email in each hour the higher one’s stress is for that hour.
There’s no way to stop the rise of new technologies, however, we can evaluate their risks and make conscious decisions on how we use them. We can still use the applications we find valuable while adopting technologies that give us more freedom in our personal lives.
Enter the rise of simple devices.
What is a simple device? It’s any device or gadget that only serves a single use. A paper book, an old Nokia phone, a vinyl record player. Compared with smartphones, simple devices don’t track your information or distract you while using them. They can help us retain our focus and become more immersed in the activities we choose.
These devices have grown in adoption by younger generations. More people are opting to pull aspects of their digital world into the physical one. You don’t necessarily have to abandon using your phone all the time. You can instead listen to more music through a vinyl record player or have a “dumb phone” whenever you need to focus. You can also carry a paper book with you instead of reading through the Kindle app on your phone.
One of the most prominent of these devices is the dumb phone, just in 2017 dumb phones sales rose by 5 percent versus a 2 percent increase for smartphones[5]. A dumb phone only has access to send text messages or receive calls. An example of a dumb phone is the Light Phone. A phone created by Google designers which only can send text, call, and play music.
Another rising trend is in the music space. Vinyl records sales jumped by about 50 percent in 2021, surpassing both digital and CD album sales[6]. In 2020, 41.7 million records were sold in the U.S, up more than 45 times from 2006. While you can tap on your phone and pull up a song on Spotify in a matter of seconds, more people are reaching for the physical experience of placing a vinyl disc in their record players.
Younger generations are also choosing to read more paper book. Of all books sales in 2019, 75% went to physical books and only 7% to e-books[7]. Reading paper books may even have some perks over physical ones. Research suggests we learn better when we have a physical copy of a text. They could provide more spatial memory than e-books, which help us remember the content better[8].
Embracing simpler technologies can lead us to calmer, more focused, and fulfilling lives. To keep in touch with our friends we don’t need to completely abandon our current devices. We can start adding “office hours” to our schedule. To increase our focus, we can start setting boundaries around when we use our devices and bringing a “dumb phone”. To listen to music, we can go to a record store and pick up a few albums that we’re interested in.
When we start setting boundaries around our technologies, we will get better at focusing on a single task and re-gaining our free time. As we continue redefining how we interact with our technologies, we might start to notice we feel closer with our friends, and we have newfound pockets of empty time. The question will now be how we can further enrich our lives with the activities and the people we find most meaningful.
[1] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (n.d.). Atus News releases. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retrieved March 7, 2022, from https://www.bls.gov/tus/
[2] Mark, G., Czerwinski, M., & Iqbal, S. T. (2018, April). Effects of individual differences in blocking workplace distractions. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–12).
[3] Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith, and Ulrich Klocke. 2008. The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘08). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 107–110. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357072
[4] Gloria Mark. Human-Computer Interaction Institute. (n.d.). Retrieved March 7, 2022, from https://www.hcii.cmu.edu/news/event/2004/10/work-fragmentation-common-practice-paradox-it-support
[5] N2RAC. (2020, November 2). Why ‘dumb’ phones are gaining relevance again. Medium. Retrieved March 7, 2022, from https://n2rac.com/why-dumb-phones-are-gaining-relevance-again-658bf1a2e58a
[6] John, S. (2022, January 4). Why vinyl records are making a comeback in 2022. The Manual. Retrieved March 7, 2022, from https://www.themanual.com/culture/why-vinyl-is-coming-back/
[7] Paper books vs ebooks statistics, trends and facts [2022]. Toner Buzz. (n.d.). Retrieved March 7, 2022, from https://www.tonerbuzz.com/blog/paper-books-vs-ebooks-statistics/
[8] Szalavitz, M. (2012, March 14). Do e-books make it harder to remember what you just read? Time. Retrieved March 7, 2022, from https://healthland.time.com/2012/03/14/do-e-books-impair-memory/