3.2 Stolen focus

As well as being drawn to spend time on our phones, it is now also suggested that even when we’re not on our phones it is now harder for us to focus on any task. Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus explores our lost concentration. He presents convincing evidence from global researchers who are experts in attention reporting that in a small-scale study among college students, it was found that they now only focus on any one task for 65 seconds, while for office workers, the average time of focus was only three minutes (Hari, 2023).

One of the reasons offered for this lost focus is that it is hard for our brains to focus on more than one thing and moving from one thing to another has a cost. The book describes this as the ‘switch-cost effect’. This is the cost to our brains, in terms of lost focus, that comes from the time we spend checking our phones. One of the clearest illustrations of this cost can be seen from a study at the Carnegie Mellon University’s human-computer interaction lab. In the experiment 136 students sat a test. Some of the students had to have their phones switched off. Others were allowed their phones and received intermittent text messages on them. In the study those students who received messages on their phones performed, on average, 20% worse than those who had no interruptions.

In the next section you will reflect upon the impact that this might have on your ability to focus on your studies.