Your Attention (and your peace) Has Been Hijacked
Poor Time Management Isn’t What’s Holding You Back - It’s Psychological Engineering. Seriously, productivity isn't the problem. I know you think it is. I know you've bought the planners, tried the apps, done the morning routines. I know you've wondered what's wrong with you… why you can't seem to get it together when you used to be so sharp, so focused, so on it. Your attention and focus has been hijacked. I don't mean that metaphorically. Ephesians 6:12 says “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world." This is not new. The enemy has always wanted to steal your focus, fragment your mind, drain your energy. What's new is the delivery system. There are people—smart people, well-funded people—who have studied exactly how to capture your attention and keep it. They know what they're doing. They've seen the research on what it does to the human mind, to our children, to our ability to think and connect and be present with the people we love. They've seen it... and they keep doing it anyway. Every time you pick up your phone and lose 45 minutes you didn't plan to lose, that's not a character flaw. That's engineering. Every time you sit down to do important work and feel a pull to check, to scroll, to just see real quick—that's not weakness. That's billions of dollars of research working exactly as designed. The enemy isn't you, your lack of discipline or organization or even your phone. The enemy is a highly engineered system built to extract your attention because your attention is worth money to people who don't care what it costs you. In January 2012, Facebook ran an experiment on nearly 700,000 people. Without telling them. They manipulated what showed up in people's feeds—more negative content for some, more positive for others—and they proved they could shift people's emotional states without anyone knowing it was happening. Not just influence… Shift. They discovered that they could make you sadder, more anxious, angry, and even excited… and you’d never even notice it was a pattern, and it was on purpose.