The Worksheet

Reset your attention span with five habits over the next five days. This companion worksheet will help you put the lessons in this article into action.

Download the Worksheet

Our attention spans have dropped dramatically over the last twenty years. Now, 57 percent of Americans do not read even a single book in a typical year. Even TikToks aren’t short enough to retain our attention, with the average view duration for a short-form video being less than 15 seconds.

This is a problem for everyone. But the issue of lost focus should be especially important to Christians, who view our lives not as our own but as a stewardship given to us by God.

How can we do our work with excellence, pursue our God-glorifying goals with intensity, and fix our eyes on Christ, when our focus is being pulled in 100 different directions at once?

We need to fix our focus.

The Reason We Can’t Focus

Why can’t we focus?

It all started with work.

In the late 20th century, the West shifted from a labor-based economy to a knowledge-based economy. It used to be that your body that was the main way you created value. But when we moved to the office and later online, we became what Peter Drucker famously termed “knowledge workers,” those who think for a living.

Suddenly it was our minds which became the value center. It became all about information. And as Economist Herbert A. Simon famously wrote in 1971, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

This trend accelerated with the birth of the Internet. And in 1997, Michael H. Goldhaber published The Attention Economy and the Net, wherein he predicted what we all know to be true today, namely that in the online world, the currency is not labor or money, it’s attention.

Now, even if you aren’t a knowledge worker, you’re still part of the attention economy. Value is being extracted from you daily through your devices. The plumber scrolling X is making money for advertisers, as is the child running a Google search, or the retiree flipping channels on the TV.

Even if we don’t recognize this, the market sure does. Because whenever there is value to be found, that great macro-economic principle of supply and demand comes a-knockin’.

The limited supply of human attention created demand. So the tech companies and advertisers began competing for it. They did this by building ever-new and better devices, more addictive algorithms, and inescapable advertisements. From the interstate billboard in Kansas to the lock screen on your Kindle, there is no escaping the attention economy.

And all of this has come at a cost to us, the consumer. Or should we say the consumed?

The Cost of Stolen Focus

As advertisers, social media companies, and the entertainment industry have strip-mined our attention, our ability to sustain focus has collapsed. In their competition to get and hold our attention—through notifications, gamification, and psychological manipulation—they have fractured our attention.

But to understand just how costly this loss of focus has been. We need to recognize that attention is upstream of almost everything blessed in life.

When you lose the ability to focus:

You can’t pursue sustained goalsYou can’t build deep relationshipsYou can’t do the long, focused work of reading or studyYou can’t pray without your mind wanderingYou can’t read the Word of God for an extended period of time

It’s for this reason that I dare say we should view the war on our attention as a spiritual war. Corey Ten Boom said, “If the devil can’t make us bad, he’ll make us busy.”

We want to be serious Christians who are maturing in our faith, honoring Christ with our work, relationships, and discipline. And that requires serious focus.

In a sermon titled “The Time Is Short” Charles Spurgeon preached:

“The reason why the majority of Christians never attain to any eminence in the divine life, is because they let the floods of their life run away in a dozen little, trickling rivulets, whereas, if they cooped them up into one channel, and sent that one stream rolling on to the glory of God, there would be such a force and power about their character, their thoughts, their efforts, and their actions, that they would really ‘live while they lived.’”

Your attention is only powerful when it is concentrated. Spurgeon was saying that believers who accomplish great things in this life are those who treat their attention like water, and train themselves to dam it up and release it all toward one focused objective at a time.

And that’s the good news: If we can fix our focus, we can fix our lives.

So, how do we attack this focus famine head-on?

It’s a lifelong battle, but let me offer you a simple plan to help you get started getting your focus back this very week.

The 5×5 Focus Fix

This little game plan consists of doing five simple habits for the next five days.

Here are the habits:

1: Log Your Distractions

We begin with awareness. It’s one thing to monitor screen time, but we want to actively pay attention to every time we feel distracted. We do this by writing our distractions down.

Just use a sheet of paper, and each time you are distracted throughout the day, jot down the time, what you were trying to focus on, and what distracted you.

2: Avoid Your #1 Attention Thief

For most of us, the phone is the biggest black hole for our attention. But more specifically, it’s probably a certain app. There it is. The one you just thought of. Delete that app.

You don’t have to keep it deleted forever, just for this week.

3: Read a Real Book for 30 Minutes

This can be Bible reading. That adds up to 2 hours and 30 minutes over the course of 5 days. You could read the entirety of Matthew, Luke, or Acts in a week if you did that.

If you’ve already got your devotions dialed to, make it another book you’ll read for 30 minutes. Remember, the goal here is not just to remove screen time but replace it with something that’s positively going to train you to focus for longer. So the content of your reading is secondary to the main objective here.

4: No Screens In Bed or Before Breakfast

Set it as a rule that you won’t look at your phone after you’re in bed. If you normally watch a show in bed before sleeping, this is a good time to replace that with step number 3 and just read a bit. The aim of all of this isn’t simply to reduce screen time, but to replace it with something better. Something that’s going to retrain us to focus.

Likewise, resolve to not use your phone or computer before you finish breakfast. Your phone should not be the first thing you reach for in the morning—email, messages, and social media can wait an hour.

5: One Hour of Screen-Free Deep Work

Work on something important—using only pen and paper, or hands-on tools—without digital interruptions. No screens, no earbuds, even. Just time to let your mind focus on what you’re doing without external input.

Block it on your calendar. Just 60 minutes of work without using a computer or phone. Set this time aside to work on a goal or project. Maybe it’s something around the house, a writing project, or something for work. Even if you think it’s normally something you’d do on the computer, resolve to work on it just on a pad of paper first. You’d be surprised what it does for your thinking and focus.

Reflection Questions

At the end of the five days ask yourselves some questions based on this experience:

What was the hardest habit to maintain each day, and why?Which habit had the biggest impact on your ability to focus?Looking at my distraction log, did you notice any patterns in what or when you got distracted?If you could keep just one of these five habits long-term, which would it be and why?How will you continue to protect your attention now that the challenge is over?Closing

Download the 5×5 Focus Fix worksheet for a full distraction log, checklists for all five baits, and reflection questions to answer at the end of the challenge.

I pray this serves you in your pursuit of a more focused, more productive, and more God-honoring life!