Who stole your focus?

Staying mindful and capturing attention

Author

Bozhidar Ivanov
February 20, 2024

I don’t like to word “Mindfulness“, as it sounds like something that I need to track via an app - but it’s been on my (if you’d pardon the pun) mind during the last weeks.

Spending most of my time at home, I am glued to my devices, for work or leisure, and find my mind filled with the million little things I want to do. This kicked my prioritization gears into overdrive, and I found myself drowned in things to do and starved of focus and calmness.

I had to get away. Apart from going out as much as I can, I’ve decided to dial down my thinking and allow myself to spend some time just relaxing, without juggling todos in my mind.

In the cold weeks until spring arrives, let’s try to not get too focused on work and leave some time for mindfulness.

This is one of the reasons I feature Stolen Focus this week - a book that I hope will help me understand where my focus went.

🪝 Hook the Reader - with science!

Neal O'Grady studied thousands of hooks from top creators and compiled a list of the most powerful tactics for grabbing people’s attention. Here are some of the most common elements of great hooks and a list of my key takeaways.

  • Curiosity, value promises and bold claims pique our interest. We want to learn interesting things, and are drawn to content that delivers.

  • Negativity biases and fear get us interested, as we all want to avoid pain and frustrations. Can your post help us do that?

  • Credibility matters! Add evidence to your posts to make people more interested in your arguments and claims.

  • Mention things we know - familiarity and trends are instantly relevant, and we are more likely to be curious about things that are well-known.

  • Faces, interesting designs, and standout formatting are attention-grabbers in themselves, so don’t leave all your creativity for the copy.

  • Transformational stories, X vs Y posts, and lists naturally grab our attention on social media.

I definitely recommend you read the full post and check out the example Neil shares here!

📚 Shelf Shocks 💥

When he found himself in a world dominated by scrolling and snapping, Johann Hari set out on a journey to discover why our focus disappeared.

The author found we lack attention not because we are lazy. Instead, he identified a volatile mix of influences - from social media and digital multitasking to mental exhaustion and the absence of mind-wandering - that chip away at our attention.

Filled with incredible stories, depressing statistics, and a few tips to help us get our minds and attention back, Stolen Focus is an incredibly important book for our hyper-connected generation!

Microsoft’s market capitalization recently surpassed Apple’s. But when Satya Nadella took the reigns back in 2014, the company was mired in bureaucracy and delivered lackluster results. How did the new CEO manage to turn the tide around?

Part biography, part business manual, this book will delve into the challenges Nadella faced and how he overcame the status quo. Above all else, his success will prove that being a humanist, even in the biggest tech behemoth, is a winning strategy.

According to the authors of Competing Against Luck, the most fundamental driver of customer behaviour can be explained by the “Jobs to be done“ framework. Simply put, when we buy a product, we “hire“ it to do a job - whether that be to make us look more attractive or fix a hole in the wall. If the product does a good job, we are more likely to purchase it again and recommend it.

Understanding this simple principle can help you improve your product strategy: from defining your niche and carrying out better market research, to findind new avenues of growth.

Or at worst - it will be your progress that gets banished.

If you find it difficult to keep writing, this free app can help you by adding the threat of losing ALL your progress if you pause for too long. This fear does a great job of protecting you against distractions so you can stay focused on writing.

Want to add professional signup forms to your website? Sumo is a great tool for the job!

Combined with the right message and offer, it can help you increase lead generation and turn more visitors into customers.

You've reached the end of my newsletter. Hooray! If you’d like to see more of my work, you can GET MY BOOK Write Better: A Simple Guide to Better Business Writing or connect with me on LinkedIn for more fun and educational content.

If you have any comments or would like to share what you enjoyed the most, feel free to get in touch! See you in two weeks!