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FEATURES 68 www.canadianlawyermag.com PRODUCTIVITY Aytekin Tank explores the truth behind our modern culture of distraction and what we can do to combat it WE DON'T always have what it takes to shut off the noise in the background. It's easy to think that being distracted is just the inability to focus, when in fact it's more complicated than that. As Seth Godin, the content god himself, said in one of his essays: "If you're not paying, you and your attention are the products." We let ourselves getting sucked into an endless cycle of distraction while the gatekeepers are busy selling our attention to advertisers. One of the problems with distraction is that we are being handed what we believe is available out there. We never second-guess if there's anything out there that we need to know as we're being fed with information we think we need. Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist, has learned firsthand about what technology does to our vulnerable minds. Harris put it best when he compared how technology works with how a magician works: giving us the illusion of choice. "The more choices technology gives us in nearly every domain of our lives – information, events, places to go, friends, dating, jobs – the more we assume that our phone is always the most empowering and useful menu to pick from." Why can't we focus anymore? We fail to see what other options are out there because we simply think what we have in our hand is the only set of options we can pick from. A close look at how we get through an hour in a day can tell us so much about how we choose to direct our attention. As the founder and CEO of Basecamp, a project management hub that champions efficiency, Jason Fried might be the voice we want to listen to: "Time is the most precious thing there is, yet we split it up and give it away like there's an endless supply. And whatever time you do have, you have even less attention." Where do we lose all the time we have? Waves of interruption of chat, notifications, presence and always-on expectations. The effect, as you might guess, is the more frag-