Johann Hari

I felt myself falling into a different rhythm. I realized then that to recover from our loss of attention, it is not enough to strip out our distractions. That will just create a void. We need to strip out our distractions and to replace them with sources of flow.

The study found that ‘technological distraction’—just getting emails and calls—caused a drop in the workers’ IQ by an average of ten points. To give you a sense of how big that is: in the short term, that’s the same knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests, in terms of being able to get your work done, you’d be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages a lot.

So if you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, you’ll make more mistakes, you’ll be less creative, and you’ll remember less of what you do.

So we aren’t just facing a crisis of lost spotlight focus—we are facing a crisis of lost mind-wandering. Together they are degrading the quality of our thinking. Without mind-wandering, we find it harder to make sense of the world—and in the jammed-up state of confusion that creates, we become even more vulnerable to the next source of distraction that comes along.

A study of office workers in the U.S. found most of them never get an hour of uninterrupted work in a typical day. If this goes on for months and years, it scrambles your ability to figure out who you are and what you want. You become lost in your own life.