Ep. 94: Attention Spans
Simple
Tsh Oxenreider
4.3 • 879 Ratings
🗓️ 18 September 2017
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We’ve all been there: you settle in with a big book or a longer article, and you just can’t seem to concentrate. Your brain flits from topic to topic, refusing to settle down and focus.
The inability to consume longer-form content is becoming an actual problem in our modern era of smartphones, screens everywhere, and billions of quick soundbite-sized content thrown at us every second. Tsh and co-host Haley talk about keeping brains sharp, eyes focused in a world of memes, GIFs, and tweets.
Then, a new short series called How You Do You.
Links From This Episode:
- The Simple Show on Instagram
- Haley's blog, Carrots for Michaelmas
- Haley's podcast, Fountains of Carrots
- Haley on Twitter and Instagram
- Tsh on Twitter and Instagram
- Tsh's Alarm clock
- Mercury extension for Chrome
- Longer-form podcasts: Constitutional, Longform, The Liturgists, Overdue
- The Chronicles of Narnia
- Kristin Lavransdatter
- The Turquoise Table, by Kristin Schell
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's the Simple Show. You've got episode 94. |
| 0:06.5 | Hi, I'm Tishawkson writer. And I'm Haley Stewart. And on The Simple Show, we talk about saying no and yes to the right things. |
| 0:13.0 | In this episode, we're talking about saying no to the overload of quick information we can get online |
| 0:18.1 | so that we can say yes to nurturing our minds with valuable and |
| 0:21.7 | thought-provoking long-form writing and media. So basically we're saying no to short form |
| 0:26.8 | exclusively so that we have more time for long form. So before we get going, though, I just wanted |
| 0:32.7 | to make a quick announcement that today is the last day to sign up for Like Your Life. That's September 18th. |
| 0:39.9 | That is my new course and it's a self-paced thing with over 30 video lessons and 100 plus |
| 0:46.1 | page journaling workbook. There's fun bonuses and an optional six-week accountability group |
| 0:51.6 | that includes live office hours with me. So if you are interested |
| 0:55.9 | in that, go to likeyourlife.me and remember you've got until September 18th to sign up. |
| 1:01.4 | If you're listening to this afterwards, still go to like your life.me and sign up to be notified |
| 1:06.6 | when we open enrollment again. I'm not sure when that'll be. We'll most likely open the course two to three times a year. |
| 1:13.9 | So you'll be one of the first to know if you sign up for that. |
| 1:16.8 | And you'll also get a little secret coupon code for whenever we open the doors again. |
| 1:24.1 | All right, Haley. |
| 1:25.4 | So start us off with this topic. What do you say no to when it comes to just the onslaught of information we have to consume? |
| 1:33.9 | Yeah, I feel like this is something I really struggle with. So I'm excited to get ideas from you and chat about this. |
| 1:39.7 | One of the things I've realized is just the sheer amount of time I can spend reading each thing that's popping up on various feeds and then not feeling like I really absorbed anything or that it was all very superficial media, not anything that like really got to the heart of things. |
| 1:59.0 | So one of the things I do is instead of |
| 2:02.7 | clicking, this is for me on Facebook, this is what I do. Instead of clicking on every article that |
| 2:09.0 | kind of sparks curiosity, I will click save for later. And usually I don't even go back and look at them. But occasionally I'd be like, |
... |
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