Attention. Please.

There’s been a war for my attention that’s been ongoing for decades now. I’m a millenial. I’m 36. I grew up as the Internet was plugged into all our homes, our schools, our workplaces, and ultimately into our pockets. No-one before us had experienced what we had at our young age, and I unknowingly became addicted to the distractions that the digital life offered unaware of how it was wreaking havoc on my mental health.

I like to stay up to date with each new advancement in technology. I found it a thrill. While in the University of Manchester as an undergrad, I remember in the first year or two as the Motorola RAZR took hold. It’s success was audible as the start of each lecture was started by someone hitting the volume down button making a progressively muted tone until their phones were set to vibrate — a single RAZRian would cue a wave of other RAZRians who also had yet to mute their phones. We were still at the interface where feature phones were giving way to smartphones and the advent of the iPhone.

In this era, I was a proud owner of a Samsung i600 — a QWERTY-equipped, 3G-enabled, Windows Mobile (not Windows Phone) device that I could web browse and check emails with. It was 2006. This thing could fetch my emails and let me know at a moment’s notice if I was the target of yet another mailing list. It was also the beginning of this new website, Facebook… I alongside many others at the time were being bombarded daily — we were unaware of the cognitive death by a thousand cuts that was slowly destroying our ability to concentrate. Until one day two months ago…

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March 2nd 2023

On a Thursday in the middle of the day, I spectacularly crashed out of my job.

I was due to have a virtual meeting with my boss and had to cancel at the last minute. What was happening was I was struggling with my mental health. I was already seeking assistance and had been to my GP to discuss options.

My last minute cancellation was primarily because of one thing — I was no longer able to concentrate. The meeting was for me — it was my one-to-one. It was my opportunity to raise with my boss what I needed support with for the coming week. Normally, I was able to voice quite clearly the things I needed but I found myself in the unprecedented position where I simply couldn’t think.

I stared at the wall for far too long. I walked around the house. I walked outside. Blank. Nothing. This went on for hours.

Truth be told, this had been creeping up on me for months. I had had bouts of lack of concentration for quite some time. I always assumed it was something a bit less sinister. Stress, or something like that. But this time round it was a total mental block that affected not just my thought, but my speech.

“Are you ok?”

My wife had come into the office. She probably heard me slam my laptop shut in frustration. I opened my mouth and there was nothing. I couldn’t talk.

“What’s wrong?”

I tried talking but for the first time in my life I was stuttering.

“I-I-I-I…”

I began to cry.

Losing my ability to concentrate was bad, but finding myself unable to communicate the way I was used to was something else. I was sobbing into my wife’s shoulder and kept bringing my head back up to speak with only one of two outcomes — no words came out, or they did on repeat and I couldn’t finish the sentence. I was broken.

It took some time to comprehend what was happening and through some laboured discussions with my wife, we came to the conclusion that I needed to talk to my HR team and sign off. I managed to find some time in their diary with an hour or so’s notice. I then readied myself by drafting a message in Teams to dump in as soon as the call kicked off.

Naturally, as the message reads, I played it down massively but I was in deep crisis. The reality was the call was a mixture of me mumbling, stuttering, and having to turn my video off due to my own personal shame. Thankfully, Sarah took the lead and realised my situation asking me a series of yes/no questions and taking us to the logical conclusion of “yes, you definitely need time off and I will communicate it to the rest of the business for you”.

I was fortunate in that my preceding time with my GP had set me up with an appointment with the NHS mental health team to discuss further support. That appointment was the next day. I arrived at the NHS site, was met with an excellent mental health nurse, who coached me through the next hour of me sobbing only to be interrupted by stuttering and the occasional “mmhmm” which was the only affirmative statement I could get out.

—

March/April 2023

I took the rest of March out of work. It took about 10 days to get past the stuttering. It was a pretty horrible time — I kept getting worked up about it and it’d set me off all over again.

I wanted to get back to work but I didn’t know how to start. I needed to work to earn. I needed to work for my own personal feeling of achievement. My brain was one of my most valuable assets — never an athlete or a socialite, I retreated into my brain to generate my value. I took to doing one of the few things that I could still concentrate on — reading. Reading as well had the added benefit of meaning I wasn’t talking which was definitely a benefit for the first couple of weeks.

It was slow going.

Reading in itself is one of the few activities usually where I flex my focus to the max. I use it as a kind of stimulus. The greatest feeling of productivity I get is after spending time in the company of a book — post-read I’m at my most imaginitive and creative. I feel like as the concepts seep into my neurons, that I’m recombining all these ideas in my head and finding new insight from things I already knew mixed with new information.

I became aware of how reading was helping me concentrate about a decade ago. I was at the time a proponent of Inbox Zero and kept my finger on the pulse all the time. At the time I actually turned to a book to understand more about innovation and how businesses worked. I gorged on Clayton Christensen and Geoffrey A. Moore to learn more, but what I realised in the process was this deep thought when reading was almost as rewarding as the actual content of the books themselves. In a desert of distraction, I found an oasis of concentration.

I always put myself down as a classic procrastinator that found novel distractions to avoid the impending deadlines. I think I used the anxiety that’d build as the goals got closer to spur me into productivity — when the stress got too much I’d surge into this adrenaline-fuelled madness that’d somehow deliver a result.

But my attraction to reading was magnified when I took a job that’d see me travel to London by train a few times a month. Skilled Victorian railway engineers had designed a route that plunged the train into deep cuttings and tunnels to avoid any decent mobile (cell) reception in forethought of my future needs. It worked. I spurned the slow loading digital distractions in favour of more dependable paper books that magically kept working when my iPhone did not.

Every morning that I travelled, I jumped into a book and plugged my ears with mostly instrumental music until, all of sudden, everyone was alighting at London Waterloo some ninety minutes later. Time ceased, flow maximised. My brain was loving it. I’d get repeated hits of whatever feel good chemicals trigger when you get that “eureka” moment. Every new learning, every new connection fuelled me for a day of productivity ahead.

—

May 2023

By this time in my life, I’d already pulled the plug on some of the highly-visible distractors like Facebook but I hadn’t yet fully developed a full understanding of what impacted my concentration or how. And truth be told, I have continued to muddle through the last decade swapping out this for that. During my time off it’s really struck me how there were some backdoors to my concentration through which distraction was seeping in. I was still using LinkedIn — it’s a business tool, right? — and, only now, do I see quite how much time and thought process was devoured not just reading it, but then thinking and even worrying about some of the posts on there. Arguably the FOMO aspect from LinkedIn was worse for me — I could deal with not being at the party that Facebook told me I missed, but I felt truly atrocious not being up-to-date on a concept or qualification that someone else in my field was posting about.

During April I start trying to work half days again, but it was a bit of a wreck. I would log on and stare at this screen for a few minutes before realising I wasn’t really doing anything. I’d try read an email and suddenly start getting overwhelmed. I kept reverting back to reading to make me feel like I still had some control and in an attempt to build back my ability to concentrate and transfer it to work again.

My time spent reading got me to Cal Newport’s Deep Work. In fact, my reading list this year so far has hinged on various takes on productivity and how other people do it— James Clear’s Atomic Habits, followed by the antidote that is 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, a quick spin through Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.

It didn’t really hit me until reading Deep Work quite how many distractions were still in my life that weren’t contributing to what I wanted to achieve. In a moment of realisation, I looked critically at everything around me and it started to make sense. Not only was there noise everywhere, I’d done an awful job at creating a safe space for my concentration — save for my routine of when I wanted to read…

I read typically first thing in the morning. Whilst not taking trains any more I put myself in an equally sterile environment (a chain coffee shop), order the same black americano, put an album on my earphones from a list of trusty records that I read to, and typically emerge at least ninety minutes later. When I do emerge from my flow state I find it relatively easy to be fleetingly distracted, then dive back in without issue.

It finally clicked in the last couple of days what I needed to do…

—

Today

Today is the first day in over two months that I’ve been able to concentrate on something other than reading for more than an hour.

Today I was able to write this as part of one of my current goals on “keeping focussed on a task until its complete”.

It has started with the same coffee shop reading routine that I got into in the last few weeks, but I used the cognitive momentum I developed to carry me over to other work after reading. And its worked. I’m grinning right now by the way.

My boss deserves credit for giving me the time to untangle this mess I got myself into. My work was a big contributor to the dizzying array of distactions that were disturbing my flow. I chose to work in a startup — I just wasn’t mentally prepared for how to handle it in a healthy way.

My confidence has been massively impacted and I’ve been holding off sharing the news with my colleagues that I’m back (albeit in a limited capacity) but today is the first day I feel confident I can get back to being a useful member of society again. But today was a good day, so I made my announcement.

Things are tracking in the right direction and for that I’m thankful.