Everything moves at lightning speed these days, and everyone seems to be always connected to everyone else. With the rise of social media, streaming, and all variations of online content, people have more ways to get distracted than ever before. That means you must be more vigilant in staying focused and productive, which brings us to the "Attention Diet."
For a lot of people, their professional life is now entwined in the rest of their life because of the internet. It has almost everything to do with smartphones and how reliant the world has become on them. You need to start holding yourself more accountable for distractions, as they are everywhere.
What is the Attention Diet?
This type of diet doesn't involve you changing your eating habits and exercising. It is to help your mental health. It is a concept brought up by Mark Manson. It looks into breaking the ever-increasing cycle of anti-productivity and losing your focus.
Ever since technology has taken over our lives, it has been easier to stray away from our goals. The Attention Diet focuses on the amount of media, content, and socializing that people are distracting themselves with these days. It has started to become a considerable problem in everyday life as people are compulsively looking at their phones more and more. If you don't start doing something about it, things will only get worse.
Why Should You Use It?
If you have found yourself forming an unconscious routine of checking different types of content throughout the day, you may have a problem. The author found himself being constantly distracted from his work, exponentially, as time went on. And he is not alone in this. An average attention span seems to be decreasing due to the pure volume of information available.
As more people do jobs that need less physical demand, the ability to lose focus becomes natural. The diet explains that you need to limit the availability of all this content to keep yourself on-track when it comes to the task at hand. It takes some self-control and some help from the technology we use so often.
Media Can Be Addictive
Like about anything else in this world, too much of something is never a good thing. When it comes to things like social media and video streaming, these things can be downright addictive. If you are not careful about how much time you spend on it, you can find yourself hooked. And it is not easy to break the habit.
Addiction is a real concern in a lot of areas, and technology has become one of the hot zones. The Attention Diet will help you get away from wasting your time on frivolous or pointless content. It leads you on the path to working more efficiently. A little hard work is going to go a long way to keep you focused.
You Must Be Proactive
How does Attention Diet work? Instead of limiting eating foods, you limit consuming digital content. For example, instead of short click-bait articles, you opt for long-form meaningful content.
Another big part of the Attention Diet is limiting the use of social media and disabling notifications. For privacy reasons, you should delete social media accounts altogether. If that's not possible, at least remove your social media apps and disable popup notifications.
Personalized ads are also quite distracting, so get a virtual private network, such as NordVPN, to see fewer of those. Using a VPN service is also going to give you a lot of privacy and security benefits, but that's a different story.
Pay Less Attention
It may seem that having media, entertainment, and communication could be nothing but a good thing for our world. The problem is that nobody is perfect, and humans have a tendency to procrastinate and lose focus at times. That is why the Attention Diet could not have come at a better time. By following a handful of fundamental principles and understandings, you can become a more efficient professional.
