Take your concentration seriously!
May 09, 2021
A few months back, Jason Braganza pointed me to this podcast episode from Cal Newport.
Each question asked during this particular podcast was very helpful to me. I literally got answers, solutions, work-arounds, frameworks (or whatever you wanna call them) to solve my own set of problems at the time.
Today, I want to put here, (kind of) a gist of an answer to one of the questions asked during the podcast (I’ll figure out later, how to put a link to the exact timestamp here, but for now it is at timestamp 41:00).
Someone asked Cal, this question:
Can you be hyper-distracted on social media for some days, & then deeply focus on the other ones?
OR…
You need to be consistent to build up Decent Cognitive Fitness?
To answer this question, Cal starts by talking about Physical Fitness.
He gives this example ~
- you exercise for one day during a week,
- then you go & binge eat twice during the same week,
- & then you come back to diet & exercise again.
Well, it doesn’t work this way!
And similar thing goes for Social Media.
If you are doing the same thing, i.e. you’re hyper-distracted on social media for some days, & then you come back and tries to focus deeply during the other ones).
You’re not taking your congnitive fitness seriously.
You need to be serious about your brain.
You need to follow, what is known as Digital Minimalism.
Which means, you need to be very intentional about what & why you are using your social medias for? It should be minimised to a level & utilizied in such a manner, where it gives you real value without getting distracted.
Of course, this isn’t to be done in one moment itself, rather slowly & by taking one step at a time. But, this is the solution!
If you give yourself distractive days very frequently, it will make it harder & harder to go back to concentration on the other days.
YOU NEED TO TAKE YOUR CONCENTRATION SERIOUSLY!
I followed this advice myself (with minimising the usage of multiple social media platforms). And I can very confidently say, I absolutely don’t regret not scrolling through the timelines & feeds every single day. It’s just not required & useful to me in any way.
It works. The process of digital minimalism totally works. It makes your life better in thousand ways. 🙂