“I had broken myself of the habit of thinking in short song cycles and began reading longer and longer poems to see if I could remember anything I read about in the beginning. I trained my mind to do this, had cast off gloomy habits and learned to settle myself down. I read all of Lord Byron’s Don Juan, and concentrated fully from start to finish. Also, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. I began cramming my brain with all kinds of deep poems. It seemed like I’d been pulling an empty wagon for a long time and now I was beginning to fill it up and would have to pull harder. I felt like I was coming out of the back pasture.. I was changing in other ways too. Things that used to affect me, didn’t affect me anymore. I wasn’t too concerned about people, their motives. I didn’t feel the need to examine every stranger that approached” — Bob Dylan, Chronicles Volume 1

The above excerpt finally caused something to click for me that I think has been brewing in the background. It’s not even that it necessarily said anything novel — the best quotes often don’t. But more that I was in a mindset where I ready to finally absorb this version of things[1]. My realization: While most actions in our modern lives cause our attention span to degrade, there are actions we can take to improve them.

A way of thinking about how technology broadly causes our attention spans to decrease is the same as why no one has ever accidentally solved a Rubik’s cube or why wired headphones would always tangle in your pocket. In the set of all possible things that can happen, a large majority of them lean toward further shuffling the Rubik’s cube or making the headphones even more tangled. Solving the Rubik’s cube or untangling the headphones calls for a very specific set of actions that all flow from one another. These are not randomly stumbled upon. One has to be actively trying to do these things. Likewise, if we don’t try to do anything to increase our attention spans, we should assume, by default, they will decrease.

I have been increasingly aware of attention span in the last few years. It’s hard not to be, knowing what we know about technology’s effect on them. Yet despite our awareness, I don’t think many of us do much to try to reverse this.

The extent of my efforts has been that for the last 16 months I’ve had an uncleared reminder on my phone that just says “The Importance of Attention Span”. I think the intention of this was to just remind me how much a competitive advantage a strong attention span can be is. I’d love to say this had any impact on my actual attention span, but in reality, it quickly became something my brain filtered out. The reminder itself — as flawed in approach as it may have been — was my way of trying to fight against my lapsing ability to focus.

For some time now, I’ve been worried about the eventual erosion of my attention span. That is, the ever-present forces of technology would at some point wear me down. Like a kid with a sandcastle on the beach; I could only delay the coming tide, not stop it.

Dylan’s observation gives me hope though. That there are ways for us to strengthen our attention spans. These options, however, do not seem to come naturally to us. Instead they will require a more active participation in order for us to see the intended results. Our attention spans are muscles, and if we do not exercise them, they will slowly atrophy.

So if attention spans are in fact muscles, and the same principles of exercise apply to them, how does this change anything?

For me I think it means attempting to take a much more active role in trying to be focused. As opposed to doing something and just hoping to fall into flow state, or waiting until every little distraction has been dealt with, can I instead just try to do something for as long as possible. Using the same principles of progressive overload, can I slowly lift myself into higher and higher levels of focus.

In an attempt to fully exhaust this attention span as a muscle metaphor, might there be a push/pull dichotomy here? There’s one side of things where I am actively pushing myself to focus on things longer. A somewhat popular focusing technique is the Pomodoro method. Could I slowly increase the amount of time that is attributed to the working stage?

The other side of things would be attempting to reduce technology use and the distractions that come with it. Jeff Bezos, goes so far as to call the smartphone “an attention-shortening device”. I think this is accurate. While I feel I do a decent job avoiding the more addictive sides of the internet(TikTok, Reels, etc), I still have times where I will end up in a similar state of dopamine-infused internet scrolling.

As with any other endeavor, this will be about trial and error. Even as I am writing this there have been moments where my focus has lapsed. I’ll do my best to try to stay diligent on this and see if I can track any sort of results. Like many other things in life, it takes a certain level of conviction. Believing that what you are doing is the right course of action even if the pay-off won’t be noticeable for years - even if the payoff is never truly noticeable.

I’m going to do my best to try different things. Sticking with what works, and disposing of what doesn’t. Perhaps over time there might be some real returns here in the form of an increased(or at least, no further decreased) attention span. But for now I’ll just take it one day at a time.

[1] In his essay *How You Know,* Paul Graham says “reading and experience are compiled at the time they happen, using the state of your brain at the time”. I very much agree with this. There’s been many times where ideas I’ve heard or things I’ve read have had a greatly different impact on me when I’ve revisited them