Don't Do Anything

On Spring, accumulation, and some thoughts while reading "Stolen Focus"

It’s that time of year in Alabama, every living thing is unfurling, drooping, and blooming, and all of it coated in a haze of pollen.

When it rains, rivulets of bright yellow powder gather in the gutters. It’s repulsive. It’s resplendent.

“Spring Woods,” Henry Ward Ranger, c. 1910

In her poem Onset, Kim Addonizio says:

       it’s spring
and it’s starting again, the longing that begins,
       and begins, and begins.

I want it to be over, I want it to never end. The longing that begins and begins.

Spring invites a reckoning with what’s accumulated - to sort, to thin, to clean. Currently, for me, it’s books.

The books have gathered in all my little corners of the house. My bedside table. The floor beside it. My nook in the kitchen. The edge of my desk. It’s as if I’m stockpiling the promise of new ideas like ammunition for some future intellectual battle.

Except I’m not reading any of it. At least, not quickly enough to make any notable progress.

I am awash in activity, but not in action. And so, I experience these stacks of books as admonitions. Totems of latent disappointment in my inability to do all the things I want to do, read all the things I want to read, or to focus on all the things I want to focus on. I am prevaricating in my own mind. I am longing to focus deeply again.

So, I did what I always do with that feeling, I went looking for a book about it.

A few friends recommended I read Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. I decided to listen to the book on Spotify to short circuit my book totem problem.

This one has been good so far. It’s a nice blend of actual storytelling, reporting, and research on the state of our individual and collective attention. A quote early on grabbed my attention, as it were, where Hari argues that our crisis of attention is not just an inconvenience - it’s an existential risk. He writes:

A study by Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon found that if you are focusing on something and you get interrupted, on average it will take 23 minutes for you to get back to the same state of focus.

A different study of office workers in the U.S. found that 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.

When we can’t focus long enough to dive deep into any single task, much less any single train of thought, we lose something essential - the ability to think creatively, to develop mastery, to train our attention on any one thing long enough to experience the clarity and satisfaction that sustained attention brings. There is simply too much information, too much input; all pollination, no production.

I’ve noticed this especially in professional contexts, where more and more, this scattered attention becomes the presenting symptom in challenging career decisions. It fundamentally alters how we make choices about our lives. There is either too much interest (“I could go in any direction!”), or too little signal (“I have no idea what I truly enjoy…”), and all the while there is the cavalcade of interruptions, alerts, news, and notifications that make it all but impossible to reflect deeply on what we actually want besides finding the next low-level dopamine hit.

The book does a good job I think of clarifying that much of the problem with our thinking (in the area of work decisions and elsewhere) is more fundamentally a problem of attention.

Hari continues:

When I went to Moscow to interview Dr. James Williams, who works on the philosophy and ethics of technology at Oxford University, he told me if we want to do what matters in any domain, in any context in life, we have to be able to give attention to the right things. If we can’t do that, we can’t do anything.

If we want to understand the situation we’re in at the moment, it helps to picture something. Imagine you’re driving a car and that someone has thrown a big bucket of mud all over the windshield. You’re going to face a lot of problems in that moment. You’re at risk of knocking off your rearview mirror, or getting lost, or arriving at your destination late. But the first thing you need to do before you worry about any of those problems is clean your windshield. Until you do that, you don’t even know where you are. We need to deal with our attention problems before we try to achieve any other sustained goal.

My first instinct for managing my attention problem is to deal with the accumulation. Said another way, do less. Better than that, do nothing.

As Jenny Odell says in her excellent book How to Do Nothing, “For me, doing nothing means disengaging from one framework (the attention economy) not only to give myself time to think, but to do something else in another framework.”

I like this mindset shift. But for me, shifting away from the attention economy usually means away from devices, and I’m not convinced it’s the devices that are the only problem any more. It’s how our devices have trained us to attend. Swiping, scrolling, short bites and comments, answering texts, checking emails, bouncing to the next thing when the slightest impediment arises. We’ve been shaped by our tools to simply drift along, never settling into thick bands of attention unless we pursue them intentionally.

When I find myself frazzled with this fractured sense of focus, unable to think clearly about something important, I try observe it as a signal to slow down. To decrease the inputs. To turn my phone on do not disturb and set it aside. To say no to something. To close my email. To cancel plans. To go for a long walk without listening to anything.

“We know on some level that when we are not focusing,” Hari says, “we are not using one of our greatest capacities.”

Yes, but perhaps our greatest capacity is the ability to choose what deserves our attention in the first place.

Outside my window nature continues its relentless spring, pollen accumulating in every corner and crevice, coating windowsills and windshields.

I washed the pollen off my car earlier this week, I blew the pollen off the patio, and wiped down the grill, knowing full well I’ll need to do the same thing ten more times before all the pollen has fallen. That’s ok, at least they were clean for a moment.

I’ve also gathered the unread books from their various stations around my home - bedside table, kitchen counter, desk corner - and returned them to their shelves. New ideas can wait. It’s my attention itself that needs tending to.

Maybe this longing that spring awakens isn’t exactly to begin, but just to persist. To keep trying to attend to what truly matters.