On Attention, Part Three: A Practice

In the first essay in this series, I described the experience of an atrophied attention span. In the second, I tried to be honest about what the research does and does not tell us. In this third essay, I want to propose a practice — small, specific, derived from both old monastic traditions and new cognitive science.

I want to be careful here. There is no shortage of advice on the internet about how to be more focused, and most of it is either trivially true (“turn off notifications”) or absurdly ambitious (“meditate for an hour every morning”). I want to propose something between those two: practices I have actually tried, that have actually helped, that do not require you to become a different person to start.

The principle

The principle underlying all of these practices is simple, almost embarrassingly so: attention is trained by the act of noticing that it has wandered, and gently bringing it back.

That is the whole practice. Every method below is a particular way of arranging the conditions so that noticing-and-returning happens more often.

The Benedictine monks knew this. Their practice of lectio divina — slow, meditative reading of a short passage, repeated until a phrase “shines” — is a thousand-year-old attention training. The Zen practice of counting breaths, returning to one whenever the mind wanders, is older. The modern mindfulness movement has rediscovered it under different vocabulary. The mechanism is the same: notice, return, notice, return, notice, return.

Practice one: the single-task hour

Pick one hour each day. During that hour, you do exactly one thing. Reading a book, writing a draft, walking without a phone. The rule is not “no distractions” — that is impossible — but “no voluntary task-switching.” If you notice you have wandered, you return. You do not scold yourself for wandering. The wandering is the point; the return is the practice.

Most people, including me, find this excruciating for the first week. By the third week, the hour starts to feel different. The mind, given permission to do one thing, eventually settles into doing it.

Practice two: the paper morning

For the first thirty minutes after waking, do not touch a screen. Read a book. Write in a notebook. Drink coffee and look out the window. The first attention of the day shapes the rest of it, and a morning that begins with a feed is a morning that has already been fragmented.

This is the practice I have found most consequential, and also the hardest to keep. The phone is right there. The feed is one tap away. The pull is enormous. But when I do keep it — when the first thirty minutes of the day are paper, not screen — the rest of the day feels different. Less reactive. More my own.

Practice three: the long walk

Once a week, walk for at least an hour, without headphones. Bring nothing but a key and an ID. The point is not exercise. The point is to be alone with your own mind for long enough that it has nothing left to react to and must, finally, start to think.

The first time I tried this, I was bored within ten minutes. By twenty minutes, I was restless. By forty, the restlessness had given way to something I had not felt in months — a steady train of thought, following one idea to the next, without interruption. I had forgotten what it felt like.

Practice four: the slow read

Pick a book that is harder than your usual reading. Read it for thirty minutes a day, with a pen in hand, underlining as you go. Stop at the end of each chapter and write two or three sentences summarizing what you read.

This is lectio divina in modern dress. The point is not to finish the book quickly. The point is to read it slowly enough that you actually read it — that the ideas enter your mind, stay long enough to be understood, and have a chance to connect to other ideas already there.

What I cannot promise

I cannot promise that these practices will give you back the attention you had at twenty. I am not sure I had a particularly good attention span at twenty, and I am not sure the attention span of someone at twenty in 1985 was dramatically better than the attention span of someone at twenty today. Nostalgia is not a measurement.

What I can promise is that the practices are worth doing for their own sake. The single-task hour is a better hour than the fragmented one. The paper morning is a better morning than the feed morning. The long walk is a better walk than the podcast walk. The slow read is a better read than the skim.

Attention, it turns out, is not something you have. It is something you do. And you can choose, on any given morning, to do it differently.

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This is the last essay in the series. If you have read all three, thank you for your attention — the rarest thing you can give.