COMING INTO FOCUS

The fracturing of attention may be one of the defining ailments of our era. What can we do to get it back?

- By Chloe Schama.

SOLE PURSUIT
Research has shown that rest, or making "empty space" in your day, is essential for productivity.
Photographs by Jamie Hawkesworth.

It happened because I wasn’t paying attention. Or rather, I was paying attention to too many things, which is the equivalent of heeding nothing at all: the baby on the counter; my seven-year-old “washing” dirty dishes at the kitchen sink; the oven, which was slow to heat; the narrowing after-dinner homework window for my fifth grader’s history project; the Slack notification that flashed above the recipe I was reading on my phone; and which institution was NPR reporting that Trump had just dismantled? Shouldn't I drop everything and tune into that? These were, ostensibly, my nonworking hours, but I was white-knuckling through them: Those collard greens that had been languishing in the fridge, they were going to get chopped and cooked tonight. Or maybe not, because a moment later, I was holding a dish towel tight to my hand after my knife slipped. I'd sliced the tip of my finger right off.

An emergency has a way of cutting out the noise, but to a lesser extent we are all teetering on this edge, the mind pulled in so many directions it can feel as though control has vanished from our grasp. And the research tells us we are heading one way: progressively, irrefutably, whittling away how long we can focus. In 2003, before smartphones were really on the scene, the average time a person spent on any one computer-related task before switching screens was two and a half minutes. Between 2016 and 2020, that interval fell to 47 seconds. How low can it go? Five seconds? One? What even is a task in the era of the scroll, that smooth and aimless motion? Art follows culture, or vice versa: The average shot in a movie in 1930 was 12 seconds; by 2010, it was less than four.