I Miss My Attention

I don’t think I’m busier than I used to be; I'm just more distracted.

In our high-tech, high-speed, noise-saturated world, I sometimes can’t understand how I once managed to raise two children, write four books, and maintain some semblance of an intentional life.

These days, I feel pulled in a thousand directions. I start tasks, get sidetracked, and stop midway. Before I know it, I’m checking something, answering something, reacting to something, struggling to remember what I was doing in the first place. It’s easy to blame the midlife brain fog, but I also sense I’ve allowed my attention to thin out, my mind to grow too scattered.

For the past several years, I’ve felt as though I’ve been living under a perpetual deadline. There were daily word counts to hit, first drafts to complete, and manuscripts to turn in. I was adept at working on demand, but I knew deep down that my flow had changed for the worse. Even now, without an immediate book project on the horizon, I still approach everything as if I’m racing an invisible clock, fuelling an unfounded anxiety.

How did I get this way? Perhaps it’s because we’ve been fed so many productivity narratives, where quantity often overshadows quality. I approach my novels with the latter in mind, but the publishing industry—and the broader culture—reward speed, output, and constant newness. I’ve become so frustrated by these expectations that I’m no longer willing to accept them as the price of living in a hyperconnected universe. My mission moving forward is to regain my focus, to create my own rhythm within the algorithm. By that I mean not merely scratching the surface of what I want to accomplish, but devoting real time, effort, and patience to my assignments, big and small.

Recently, I’ve been examining the concept of deep thinking: the deliberate practice of going beyond surface-level understanding to explore ideas, problems, or experiences with depth, structure, and reflection. It’s less about speed and more about the quality of attention. The conscious choice to slow down, probe deeper, and ask better questions about the things I truly value.

In our scroll-heavy, on-to-the-next existence, I’ve fallen prey to its opposite: shallow thinking. Surface-level processing. Engaging with information just enough to react, like, or emojify, but not enough to truly absorb it. Part of that is sheer overload, an unfortunate byproduct of our social-media-driven age. There is so much happening around us—politically, socially, culturally—that it can feel as though there isn’t enough bandwidth for depth. Hence, I often stop at the first layer and move on.

But that learned mindset began spilling into other aspects of my day-to-day life. I thought I was being efficient, yet I made careless mistakes. I thought I was being expansive, but I was simply poor at setting boundaries. I thought I was staying well-informed, but I was mostly absorbing other people’s urgency. It became the mental equivalent of skimming instead of reading closely.

This shift began to matter. I feared it was affecting my creativity, my ability to let ideas and emotions germinate long enough to unfold beyond their first, easy form. To follow that evolution through trial and error, layer upon layer. I want to apply deep thinking and move to a more meaningful rhythm of deep work. Back to sitting and imagining and writing without an internal stopwatch ticking in the background. Back to completing a task without resenting the time it required. A headspace before multitasking was considered a virtue. To a moment when my attention wasn’t a commodity, but whole and self-directed.

The fact is, I miss the version of myself that read slowly instead of scrolled mindlessly before bed. I miss longer stretches of quiet. I miss when I could sit with my work without rushing it.

Even as I write this post, I have to resist the urge to open another tab or check my phone at the flash of a notification. Reclaiming deep work will require unlearning the bad habits that have crept up on me. But if I want to be more present, selective—and inspired—it will be worth the time and effort.

We’ll see if I can ignore the next notification...