A few years ago Apple introduced an exciting new feature to their mobile operating system iOS: Focus Modes. This feature allows you to alter your device’s setup, notifications and so on, in order to suit what kind of work, what kind of ‘zone’ you are in.
The thing is, this feature was built to mitigate a problem that digital devices have long promulgated: the erosion of boundaries around our thinking within our environment – allowing the possibility of dealing with home-related phone calls at work, and thinking about work even when you’ve got home – just for example. These ubiquitous devices have long created distractions for us and pulled us away from ‘the moment’, whether it’s sitting around the dinner table, enjoying an evening with friends, or trying to focus during a long meeting at work.
The fact is, our focus was fine when we used to use our physical environment as a means to help it. Before internet-connected computers in our pockets, work was work and home was home, and the place where our body was, generally, was the place our mind was. We had much less trouble getting distracted by things from outside our environment. Now the ubiquity of devices, the notifications, and the lack of boundaries around our tech, are like a constant white noise, making it harder to find signal when sweeping the radio frequencies of our lives. (To torture an anachronistic metaphor.) This is all making us more confused and stressed, our energies depleted trying to keep mental tabs on it all.
So a ‘solution’ like Focus Modes ought to be a signal flag of the deeper problem, the fact that we have allowed digital distractions to erode the power of the environment to help us truly focus. Thankfully, that power is still there, if we can truly put a more powerful limit on digital distractions, ‘dumbing down’ our phones so that we are notification-free, and perhaps game- and social-media- and media-consumption-free.
I’m currently reading The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy-Paul which is exploring exactly all the ways in which we use the world around us to help us think. The lie of the digital revolution, that it can all happen whenever and wherever we like, has taken its toll, and been shown to be untrue. It’s time to take back our attention, and put our bodies where we want our minds to be.
Ben David Trigg 