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a small study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard looked at the 10 of some of their workers in two situations. At first they tested their 10 when they were not being distracted or interrupted. Then they tested their IQ when they were receiving emails and phone calls. The study found that "technological distraction"-_just getting emails and calls caused a drop in the workers' IQ by an average of ten points. To give you a sense of how big that is: in the short term, that's twice the knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests, in terms of being able to get your work done, you'd be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages a lot.

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 39)

One of the leading experts on this topic is Guy Claxton, professor of learning sciences at the University of Winchester, who I went to interview in Sussex, in England. He has analyzed what happens to a person's focus if they engage in deliberately slow practices, like yoga, or tai chi, or meditation, as discovered in a broad range of scientific studies, and he has shown they improve your ability to pay attention by a significant amount. Iasked him why. He said that "we have to shrink the world to fit our cognitive bandwidth." If you go too fast, you overload your abilities, and they degrade. But when you practice moving at a speed that is compatible with human nature- and you build that into your daily life you begin to train your attention and focus. "That's why those disciplines make you smarter. It's not about humming or wearing orange robes." Slowness, he explained, nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 36)

Scientists then studied professional speed-readers and they discovered that even though they are obviously better at it than the rest of us, the same thing happens. This showed there's just a maximum limit for how quickly humans can absorb information, and trying to bust through that barrier simply busts your brain's ability to understand it instead. The scientists investigating this also discovered that if you make people read quickly, they are much less likely to grapple with complex or challenging material. They start to prefer simplistic statements. After I read this, I looked again at my own habits. When I read a physical newspaper, I'll often be drawn to the stories that I don't understand yet--why, say, is there an uprising in Chile? But when I read the same newspaper online, I usually skim those stories, and click on the simpler, more scannable stories related to the stuff I already know. After I noticed this, I wondered if in some ways we are increasingly speed-reading life, skimming hurriedly from one thing to another, absorbing less and less.

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 35)

Shortly before I met with him, Sune had seen a photograph of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, standing in front of a room of people who were all wearing virtual reality headsets. He was the only person standing in actual reality, looking at them, smiling, pacing proudly around. When he saw it, Sune said, 'I was like holy shit, this is a metaphor for the future." If we don't change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where "there's going to be an upper class of people that are very aware" of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with "fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they're going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more."

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 34)

Picture reading an eighty-five-page newspaper. In 1986, if you added up all the information being blasted at the average human being_-TV, radio, reading it amounted to 40 newspapers' worth of information every day. By 2007, they found it had risen to the equivalent of 174 newspapers per day. (I'd be amazed if it hasn't gone up even more since then.) The increase in the volume of information is what creates the sensation of the world speeding up. How is this change affecting us? Sune smiled when I asked. "There's this thing about speed that feels great... Part of why we feel absorbed in this is that it's awesome, right? You get to feel that you are connected to the whole world, and you feel that anything that happens on the topic, you can find out about it and learn about it." But we told ourselves we could have a massive expansion in the amount of information we are exposed to, and the speed at which it hits us, with no costs. This is a delusion: "It becomes exhausting." More importantly, Sune said, "what we are sacrificing is depth in all sorts of dimensions.. .. Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection. If you have to keep up with everything and send emails all the time, there's no time to reach depth. Depth connected to your work in relationships also takes time. It takes energy. It takes long time spans. And it takes commitment. It takes attention, right? All of these things that require depth are suffering. It's pulling us more and more up onto the surface."

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 33)

I ate enough lobsters that, if that species ever evolves consciousness, I will be remembered as their Stalin figure, destroying them on an industrial scale.

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 27)

It's when you set aside your distractions, he said, that you begin to see what you were distracting yourself from.

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 27)

"Obesity is not a medical epidemic- it's a social epidemic. We have bad food, for example, and so people are getting fat." The way we live changed dramatically our food supply changed, and we built cities that are hard to walk or bike around- and those changes in our environment led to changes in our bodies. Something similar, he said, may be happening with the changes in our attention and focus. He told me that after studying this topic for decades, he believes we need to ask if we are now developing "an attentional pathogenic culture"-an environment in which sustained and deep focus is extremely hard for all of us, and you have to swim upstream to achieve it. There's scientific evidence for many factors in poor attention, he said, and for some people there are some causes that lie in their biology, but he told me what we may also need to figure out: Is "our society driving people to this point so often, because we have an epidemic [that's being) caused by specific things that are dysfunctional in our society?" Later I asked him- -if I put you in charge of the world, and you wanted to ruin people's ability to pay attention, what would you do? He thought about it for a moment, and said: "Probably about what our society is doing."

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 13)

We need to keep the bots out, and luckily, in many cases, it's not too difficult. Bots can be blocked primarily by using a firewall, which can be added to most websites using a service such as Cloudflare or Malcare, or by your hosting provider. These services will block the majority of bots, but still let in the ones you want (hello, Google!). With this in place, you can not only reduce the carbon footprint of your website, you can also improve load speeds, enhance security, and stop competitors from scraping your information. Win!

— Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood (Page 67)

The next question was whether the font included any elements we didn't need. Using the character map viewer provided by Font Drop, we were able to see that our Inter UI font file contained 2,192 characters supporting thirty-nine languages, most of which our website simply didn't need (http://bkaprt.com/swd/04-08/). We used the font subsetting tool from Everything Fonts to strip out the unused characters, leaving us with a subsetted version of Inter UI containing only ninety-eight characters (http://bkaprt.com/swd/04-09/). The final file was a mere 7 KB, a reduction of 97.7 percent in file size compared to the official Inter UI file we'd started with, and without any negative side effects for users of our website. So long as you have control of the font files, and the foundry's license terms allow for web use and optimization, you can repeat this process for almost any font, improving performance and sustainability with just a few minutes of effort.

— Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood (Page 60)

We started with the original Inter UI font file in TTF format and converted it to a more efficient WOFF2 file format using Font Squirrel's Webfont Generator (FIG 4.2) bkaprt.com/swd/04-07/). This reduced the file size to 77 KB with no loss of quality whatsoever.

— Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood (Page 60)