Stay Focused

Journaling to bring back attention in a time of screens.

Think back to the time before the screens. 

Back when information was still exchanged through ink and paper. When the internet was just entering its 2.0 phase—the curiosities of the original web were giving way to the hyper monetization of Silicon Valley start-ups. Blue-pixeled social media was on the rise, it was the advent of “the feed,” and the attention economy was spinning up.

It was 2005 and I was in college.

I spent most evening in the libraries of Furman University, studying for a few hours after dinner. I settled on a space in the main campus library at one of the carrels a short distance from a water fountain (and the men’s bathroom). It was literal heads down time, my face in a book or notes or essay drafts.

At a certain point, I got a laptop, which I’d lug around to work on papers. But having access to the Internet and all its twitchy buzz quickly became a distraction. Evenings, which used to be periods of deep focus, gained a new static—a sparkling hum of email, AIM messages,…