Always available, always busy – yet we often feel like we never truly finish anything. Our attention has become a scarce resource as we try to juggle multiple tasks at once. But this very approach slows us down and makes us less effective. In this interview, Johann Hari, author of “Stolen Focus”, explains why multitasking is a myth – and how single-tasking can help us become more productive, creative, and fulfilled. A conversation about digital overstimulation, focus as a key skill, and practical tips for regaining attention in everyday life.
Interview
“Our adaptability has limits”
What prompted you to write a book about the fact that we can no longer concentrate effectively?
Johann: I went on this journey for a very personal reason. Nowadays an average office worker is only able to focus on one task for a maximum of three minutes. For every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when I was seven years old, there's now 100 children identified with this problem. I travelled all over the world – from Moscow to Miami to Melbourne – to interview more than 200 of the leading experts on attention and focus to do a deep dive into their research. I wanted to find out: why is this happening, and what we can do to counteract it. Scientific findings show that there are twelve factors wrecking our ability to focus and to think deeply. They range very widely – from the way our offices work, to the food we eat, to how our kids’ schools work. Once we understand the science of why this is happening to all of us, we can actually deal with it.
As described in your book, many today find it difficult to read a book, and the constant switching between tasks impairs our ability to think deeply. Which of the factors that damage our attention are the most relevant?
Johann: I interviewed Professor Earl Miller, one of the leading neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and he explained to me a crucial fact about the human brain: You can only produce one or two thoughts in your conscious mind at once. That's it. But we believe that we can do several things at once – that we can, let’s say, write an article, while being interrupted by texts. But when neuroscientists studied this, they found that when people are doing this, they are actually juggling. They're switching back and forth. They don't notice the switching because their brain papers it over, to give a seamless experience of consciousness. But what they're actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment-to-moment, task-to-task – and that comes with a cost. The technical term for it is "the switch-cost effect." When you attempt to do more than one thing at a time, you do all the things you are trying to do much less competently. You make more mistakes, you remember less of what you're doing and you are a lot less creative. Being chronically interrupted is twice as bad for your intelligence.
How can we integrate monotasking into our lives and into our workplaces?
What's so bad about taking a quick look at your emails or reading a text message during a task you’re working on?
Johann: Professor Michael Posner found that if you're interrupted, it takes 23 minutes on average to get back to the level of focus you had before you were interrupted. So, it seems like that a "quick look" at your email inbox will only take 30 seconds – but it takes 30 seconds plus the 23 minutes to get your focus back after.
Haven't we now become adept at multitasking, doing four or five things at the same time, for example checking emails or making phone calls while working?
Johann: Humans are very adaptable – but there are limits to our capacity to adapt. We cannot adapt to a life with, let’s say, low oxygen or at the bottom of the ocean. You just become less competent.
To be able to focuse better, you went to a small fishing village for three months to find yourself again, without a connection to the internet, without a cell phone. What did you discover during this time?
Johann: In my first webless week, I stumbled around in a haze of decompression. Normally I follow the news every hour or so, getting a constant drip-feed of anxiety-provoking factoids and trying to smush it together into some kind of sense. Instead, I simply read a physical newspaper once a day, wandered around reading books and talking with people. Every few hours, I would feel an unfamiliar sensation gurgling inside me and I would ask myself: What is that? Ah, yes. Calm. I was living within the limits of what my brain could actually handle. I felt my attention growing and improving with every day that passed.
When you attempt to do more than one thing at a time, you do all the things you are trying to do much less competently.
Johann Hari, Journalist and Author of “Stolen Focus”
How lasting were these changes?
Johann: In Provincetown on the east coast of the US, I could see more clearly than I ever had before in my life – my own thoughts, my own goals, my own dreams. So, when the time came to leave the beach house and come back to the hyperlinked world, I became convinced I had cracked the code of attention. I returned to the world determined to integrate the lessons I had learned about flow, switching, and much more in my everyday life. But within a few months, my screen time was back to four hours a day, and my attention was fraying and breaking again.
Complete abstinence may therefore not be a solution, as we cannot simply go without the digital world. What small, practical solutions are there that address these various issues of decreasing attention?
Johann: There are dozens of things we can do as isolated individuals to protect our attention, and our kids' attention. Methods like the Pomodoro technique or monotasking are helpful. I have the app “Freedom” on my phone, I often leave my phone at home, I eat differently, and I sleep more. I own something called a K-Safe. It's a timed plastic safe that will lock away your phone for anything between five minutes and a whole day. It's important to me to reduce my cell phone use whenever I can. I won't sit down to watch a film with my partner unless we both put our phones in the phone safe. And I won't have my friends around for dinner unless we all imprison our phones.
About Johann Hari
Johann Hari is a British journalist and author. In his book “Stolen Focus”, he examines the causes of the attention crisis in the modern world. Hari interviews over 200 experts worldwide and shows how technological distractions and social factors affect our concentration. He calls for us to regain control of our attention in order to be able to live focused and creatively again. His book “Stolen Focus” is published by Bloomsbury Publishing (352 pages).
Website: www.johannhari.com
Instagram: johann.hari
X: johannhari101
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