How I Fixed My Attention Span

I kind of feel like

my attention spam is dying

knocks on the door

it's just like

whenever I try and do anything,

I start craving some sort of distraction

I can't just focus on one thing at a time

even if that thing is sleeping.

But I have things I wanna do, things I focus on

I just don't

because refreshing Instagram is

always going to be easier

... and it's a problem!

And I'm tired of it.

I am tired of feeling like my life is
so far out of my own control.

So today,

we are figuring out how to stop scrolling,

and how to start paying attention.

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[slam]

So, what's in the box?

[box opening]

This is an electroencephalogram,
or an EEG.

It measures electrical activity in the brain

which are associated with certain
performance metrics

like attention, excitement and stress.

Does that look good?
How's that - How do I look?

Now these things usually look
a little bit more

threatening and wire-y,
however

I reached out to this brand
called Emotiv

that creates more simplified
consumer options.

They gave me a little discount

so I could actually afford this
for the video.

And I look like a cyborg.

I think it looks cute.

Okay, so these are my brainwaves

and if I focus on it

really hard

it should be able to translate these

into more understandable metrics...

like attention!
Look at that!

You see the building of tension
and spike in excitement;

that's my brain!

I kind of feel like a videogame character
and these are my stats.

It's cool.

Now I should note that EEG data
can be pretty noisy

and things like movement
can really impact the results.

However, I think that having any level of
recording is an improvement

because I basically never pay attention
to my attention.

It only every really comes up when
I'm feeling guilty about my screentime,

or I realise that
I've done nothing all day.

And only having these really infrequent
and negative interactions with my problem

makes it really hard to be
objective about the whole thing,

to understand how bad it actually is

and see if it's getting better or worse.

But now, with the help of this brainscanner,

I finally got to measure a
baseline for my attention span

without getting bogged down by guilt,

or forgetting to focus on my focus.

[typing]

I wore the EEG while I worked, ate,
exercised and relaxed.

I did take it off a few times
because it gets pretty uncomfortable

after really long stretches.

Woah!

But, overall,
it was pretty easy to ignore

while I just lived my life
for the rest of the week.

Alongside the EEG, I installed
a program to automatically track

how often I switched tasks on my computer,

and I recorded
how many times I picked up my phone.

Did you know that you can't actually
export you screentime data!

Then I wrote a quick script
to compile all this data and visualise it.

Here is my life for the past three days.

Ooh.

The x-axis is the number of hours in a day.

These blue bars represent the
number of times I picked up my phone.

This grey line tracks how productive
I was at my computer,

and these coloured lines are the median
performance metrics from my EEG.

Now, some highlights include this moment

where I picked up my phone to start
debugging the app that I was using to scan my brain,

and then I ended up [uh] opening Instagram
and spending the next two hours on it.

[laughs]

However, during my meeting the next day

I was like super interested and attentive,

right? Great? No.

It's because I kept picking up my phone!

I was supposed to be on call!

I kept opening up Instagram!

But it's not all bad news.