I Got to the Beach Three Times

Sometime last year I stopped taking pictures of Vigo. At first I was more focused on what I had to do, so I forgot to take my phone out. After that it became deliberate, because I realised I was always scanning my environment for a picture to post on Instagram rather than being there.

The relief of not reaching for it is hard to describe.

My brother-in-law got married here last week. Family in Argentina needed photos, so the phone came out, and I was annoyed. Not at the family. Pulling the phone out broke being in the event. As always, everyone around me was speaking Spanish. I was trying to listen, trying to spot words, pick up the rhythm of the conversation — it takes a ridiculous amount of concentration.

At the small ceremony, I felt, for the first time since Steve Jobs put a camera on my phone, that the device was interrupting my being in the room. I have been in these situations hundreds of times, maybe thousands. But this time I could not wait to put it away.

The Price of a Car

Sangeeta told me to read Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. She told me a few times. It was already sitting in my Audible wishlist — where books go to wait for an impulsive Tuesday — and normally that would have been enough. Click, download, forget.

But buying it now felt like buying a car. That is not an exaggeration. The impulsiveness has dropped that far. But when Sangeeta is insisting that you read a book, you better know it's worth reading.

Heavy Forearms

Hari's argument is not that your attention has wandered off, or that you lack discipline, or that modern life is a bit distracting. His argument is that your attention has been stolen by systems deliberately engineered to take it.

I already knew what that theft felt like in my body. I wrote this mid-work, mid-resistance:

Forearms are heavy, head feels like it wants to sleep, feeling in my face and neck that is pure frustration.

That is not distraction. That is a physical response to an environment designed to pull you out of yourself. Hari names the thief. The body already knew what being robbed felt like.

The Notebook That Will Change Everything

I got diagnosed with ADHD late in life. Processing that has been most of the last six months.

ADHD is not just getting distracted. It is impulsiveness — it is walking into a stationery shop and seeing a notebook so beautiful that you believe, genuinely believe, that this is the one that will change everything.

If I have this notebook, I will sit in a café in Paris like Gertrude Stein and write. I will organise my life. I will become the person I keep telling myself I am.

And then the notebook sits on the desk, unmarked, because it is too beautiful to spoil, and another one joins it, and another. For the last six months I have been able to walk into a stationery shop and not buy a new notebook.

Some things have come under control. Some things have not. I still forget things, and that part may never be fixed.

But Hari goes further: the attention crisis presents as ADHD but is largely environmental. When I read that, having just received the diagnosis, I did not know what to do with it. It does not make the diagnosis wrong. It does make you ask a question you cannot un-ask — what around me is making this worse, and what happens if I remove it?

The Hedgehog Unrolls

So I removed things.

As you know, I killed everything except LinkedIn and YouTube last December. I got on Instagram in 2010 and I loved it; it rebooted a love of photography I thought I had lost as a teenager, and for years it was genuinely good. Then at some point it stopped being about photography and became a rival to TikTok, and the thing I loved disappeared into the thing that was stealing from me.

Duolingo went next. That streak counter was feeding a number, not a language. I narrowed what I write about to one thing and started building a body of work instead of scattering myself across topics.

Somewhere in my Google Drive I found documents destined to become London Coworking Assembly articles, Coworking Values Podcast episodes, pieces I had outlined and abandoned — probably three months' worth of content I never acted on. Now there is a clearing. I can see how it all stitches together.

Because I am less and less fragmented, I can write one piece much faster — I stay with it instead of going down rabbit holes. I have always struggled to maintain focus when working on something, particularly something difficult, even when I want to do it. That is changing. I am only halfway through Stolen Focus, but what I am already taking from it is the attempt to live life like a book instead of like Twitter. Which is what I had been doing for way too long.

Then other things started. A few weeks ago I began running again, and every time it gets a little easier. At first I focused on getting out of the house, not on going running — once I was out I might as well run to get it over with. I had been wanting to get back to it for two years, and then I just pulled the trigger and got on with it.

Every summer there is the Marisquiño BMX, skateboard and music festival here in Vigo. The downhill race happens on the hill at the end of our road, which is what I run up. I run up those steps listening to the Rocky theme.

Reading

Another thing I pulled the trigger on was sticking with reading a book. I have always found it genuinely difficult since I was a child. As I took more and more noise out of my face, my ability to read and stay focused is gradually increasing day by day — I can read the words better, and I am less likely to fall asleep mid-sentence.

I stopped living like a rolled-up hedgehog. Not that I had realised I was one.

For fifteen years I could have given you a twenty-minute off-the-cuff talk about why using your phone before sleep is a terrible idea — the mental health, the sleep, all of it. I knew everything. But not picking up the phone required the kind of effort and sheer panic you would need to abseil down Canary Wharf Tower. Last year I suddenly fell prey to the worst habit of scrolling in the evening I have ever had, and it was making me mentally ill. I could not stop.

Now I wait for someone to tell me that Andy Burnham has won in Makerfield, and when he becomes Prime Minister I will wait for someone to tell me that too. I do not need to follow the whole thing online. What I am looking for now is a reason to look forward to what I will read when I get into bed, especially when I go to bed early so I can enjoy more of the day.

Schools Out

Alice Cooper has been playing in my head all week, because school finishes here in Galicia and the summer stretches out ahead of us — #supercoolwife, #supercoolson, and me. This is our fourth summer living here, and somehow last summer came and went in ten minutes and I only got to the beach three times.

That is fewer than when we used to come here to visit, and we have been here every year since our son was born fifteen years ago. To live here, in this place, and only manage three beach visits in an entire summer is fucking ridiculous.

This summer I am determined to be outside more than I have ever been.

There is something else I find painful after four years in Spain. I have been married to a Spanish speaker for twenty years. I know a lot of Spanish words, but I have never worked out how to put a sentence together and respond in real time. At family events, at weddings, at dinner tables, I miss things.

I know I am missing out on people because I cannot speak the language, and it breaks my heart. I never understood why I struggled so much with it. I put it down to stolen focus now. I would not have said that this time last year.

Working through this ADHD diagnosis has made me feel awake, present, on the same frequency as more of the world than I have ever felt. That is what all of this is for. The cuts, the focus, the running up the steps every morning. None of it is about productivity or output. It is about being present for the people I love. It is about not missing another summer. It is about finally being able to have a conversation with my own family.

Eleanor's Question

It is not even a getting-through-it thing. It is a new normal.

That line was about running, but it works for all of it. Intrinsic motivation and the actual thing I need to do have joined up. When something difficult comes at me, I am far more likely to hit it first and stay with it, and I get distracted less and less as I go. That is what focus feels like.

Which is when I started thinking about the environments that make this possible, and the ones that make it impossible, a lot of you will know the Eleanor story.

I was in a coworking space in 2013 and Eleanor used to ask to me morning: "What are you working on today, Bernie?" I had no idea what I was working on.

My head was all over the place. Then I would see her in the kitchen, and in the five seconds it took me to walk from my desk to where she was standing, I would have a meltdown, reconfigure myself, and think about what I could say, because I needed to find an answer.

Eleanor's question was not asking for anything. It was not extracting a progress report. It was offering a framework for the day that my own brain could not yet offer itself. That question, asked every morning by someone who expected an answer, was an environment that gave me my attention back.

If the environment can steal attention, the environment can also give it back. The spaces you are building are doing the same work I have been doing privately for six months, and the same work Eleanor was doing in that kitchen in 2013 — removing the thief, giving people the presence to not miss their own summers, to not sit at a dinner table and miss the conversation. That is not a niche. That is infrastructure for a life worth paying attention to.

Instead of living life like Twitter, I want to live life like a book. That is a long turnaround, and I am in the middle of it.

Monday Domino

Go to bed with a book, not a phone. One night. Notice how you sleep.

That's it!

Bernie's Picks

• Stolen Focus by Johann Hari — Our ability to pay attention is collapsing - here is a good place to find out what you can do about it for yourself.
• The Coworking Community Builder email course — if you are building a space where people can actually focus, you are doing something that matters more than you think.
• Marisquiño — BMX, skateboard and music festival here in Vigo in Galicia every summer. The downhill race happens on the hill at the end of our road. Watch the video.
• Read: Your Coworking Space Is Someone's Mental Health Infrastructure
• VoiceNotes — being on the move and able to dictate ideas is an incredible way to capture thoughts that would otherwise disappear before you sit down to type.