Increase your size of Attention Span! by using these Quick & Dirty tricks.

Anirudh Mathad
Sep 3, 2018 · 2 min read

Make a boring topic interesting by using these 5 tricks.

Often I am easily bored and tend to have an attention span of a *Insert analogy here*. But you get it, I am too bored to even come up with an analogy.

So I compared things that I am interested in and tried to imitate the same to boring topics. I am often live and breathe topics which are interesting. But not so much for others.

“I am only passionately curious” — Albert Einstein

So Albert Einstein believes he is not smart, he is just passionately curious.

What if I am not passionately curious ? Which I am always ? Often many things in life are “Jobs to be Done!” but we are not passionate about it. Doesn’t mean we cannot be curious.

How to build curiosity on an alien topic?

Ask 5 random(at least) questions about the topic. If I am reading about a complex technical heavy engineering nerd friendly topic, I would ask

  1. At a high level (in layman’s terms) what does this do ?
  2. What is the impact on every day life ?
  3. What were we doing before this ?
  4. Why now ?
  5. Why is so important ?

Always go with at-least 5 questions. It can be random doesn’t have to be the ones above. Reading a boring material is easier if you are looking for something. It better be small. Once you are done getting answers to these take a break. You are free! Come back later. But always ensure to comeback. Problem with short attention span is not that you don’t focus for long, It is that you never comeback to the same topic. If you always comeback to the topic even a week late, reading the same thing twice gives you a lot of gotchas.

Pro level:

If you don’t understand something don’t break your head move to the next paragraph or page. Try to make a small summary of those pieces. After a couple of paragraphs you things will try to make sense.

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