Take Back Your Attention
- PrefaceTo the Person Who Always Feels "Not Disciplined Enough"
- Chapter 1Is Your Attention Being Stolen?
- Chapter 2It's Not Your Self-Discipline — The Truth About Attention
-
Chapter 3Why White-Knuckling It Always Loses
A Stanford team set out to hand a medal to heavy multitaskers. What they found was the opposite: the people who juggle the most screens do worse on every measure of attention. This chapter opens the invisible bill — every "just one quick look" has a price.
-
Chapter 4Designed to Hook You
In 2006 a designer made a "Next page" button disappear with a few lines of code. Today billions of people pull a slot machine built for them personally. This chapter explains how that machine works — and why "just use your phone less" was never going to work.
-
Chapter 5Anxiety Is the #1 Thief of Your Attention
Phone face down. Notifications off. A clean desk, a 90-minute block on the calendar — and you still can't work. This chapter is about that exact moment: when what's stealing your attention isn't your environment, it's your emotions.
-
Chapter 6Design Your Environment, Don't Punish Yourself
People with terrifying self-discipline usually don't have stronger willpower — they've arranged the battlefield differently. Three weapons here: friction, precommitment, and defaults. Plus a section for the case nobody likes to admit: when the environment isn't yours to control.
-
Chapter 7Entering Depth
A counterintuitive start: the place people most often enter flow isn't leisure — it's work. This chapter is about opening that door reliably, and why it gets harder when you're working alongside AI.
-
Chapter 8Learning to Read Again
One of the world's leading reading neuroscientists sat down to reread a novel she had loved — and couldn't. Her eyes raced ahead for the gist, impatient with the long sentences she once savored. This chapter is about what screens have done to your reading brain, and how to turn "read" back into "kept".
-
Chapter 9Make It a System
By now your toolbox is full. A full toolbox is not a system. This chapter is about keeping only a few foundation stones — and about the largest invisible hand of all: the organization you work inside.
-
Chapter 10And Then?
The last chapter doesn't hand you anything new. It asks you to do one thing — one thing you can finish tonight.
The complete book is coming
If you've read this far and think it deserves a shelf, tell me via the blog — I'll post publication updates there first.
