Regaining My Attention Span - Part 1: The Plan Starts
Do you ever feel like you lost the ability to do basic things, like focusing or paying attention to stuff? Because that's kinda how its been feeling for me this past year.
It's dumb saying it out-loud like that, but I'm serious with this, it feels like I've lost that focus over time, with the biggest suspect about causing it being this... massification of short form media.
Wherever you go it seems like everyone's pushing for making things in 3 minutes or less, which isn't bad in some cases, but when the sites that host these promote them far more than their usual formats (like images on instagram, or normal, horizontal videos on youtube) it leads to people making short form content about practically everything so the algorithms pick them up, and it gets enticing to watch them, they're short things after all! but when you digest one, after another, after another... It's kinda obvious why my attention span worsened, my mind keeps expecting very short things rather than the usual, long form things I used to see before.
This also affected other things I do, it's a struggle to watch a movie that's more than 2 hours long for instance, or to even sit down and play games, watch series, or read books altogether.
I'm tired of it, I wanna change this and go back to where I was before, even if it's far harder than losing that attention span in the first place, so I've come up with a plan I'll start using to fix this once and for all.
The plan is simple, I'll start by watching, playing or reading medium/short sized things, and keep adding a bigger duration onto them over time. I'll also be avoiding short form media as much as I can.
For the things I usually check out, this would be: series with episodes being around 11 minutes, short books with 100 pages or less/comics as a whole, or short games (4 hours or less)/games that are roguelike/roguelite.
Let's go by parts with these. I know I said above that I struggle with movies that are above 2 hours, so instead of jumping headfirst at those I wanna get used to watching series at first, specifically the ones with smaller duration to get used to it again. As time goes on I'll keep increasing the amount they last per episode until I can go back to watching movies consistently again.
Books with 100 pages or less seem like a good amount to start reading again, I haven't read books consistently since I was a kid, so its best to start small rather than with a novel, I feel. Comics are usually around these margins which is why I included them as a whole.
As for games, short ones I feel are the best to start with as they can be completed in few days, which makes them less of a struggle to keep playing for long periods of time. I also included roguelikes/roguelites on this as each run usually takes a short period of time all things considered, hell most of them can be done in one sitting, which makes me less worried about how long it may take. In these cases I'd be aiming at games with looser stories though (so less Hades, more things like Haste).
I'll be starting with this plan now, I already got some series, books/comics and games that I'll be watching/reading/playing, and I'll be sharing my progress with this on the following weeks.
I could have kept this as a secret plan, but I wanted to bring it up here to force me to go with it in a way, I already tried to fix this in other ways yet because I only knew about it, I didn't felt really pressured to change it, which is really bad in my eyes, so I'm hoping that sharing this will keep me on going with this plan.
Hope to see you again soon. Bye!
-AnubiArts, the brainrotted one.