There is a stubborn charm to the claim that people in the 1970s concentrated better than we do now. The story gets told like this a lot: fewer screens, slower days, long attention spans. That narrative is partly true, partly nostalgic, and partly misleading. What interests me more is not whether they were better but how they learned to hold attention for hours at a stretch without leaning on productivity hacks or apps. This piece is about the practices, the small cultural norms and the accidental discipline that created sustained focus in ordinary lives. I argue that we can learn from those habits not by imitating their aesthetics but by restoring a few structural conditions they relied on.
Not a mood but an ecosystem
People in the 70s did not simply wake up and become monks of concentration. Focus was supported by an ecosystem of ordinary things. Workplaces expected long uninterrupted stretches of attention for clerical tasks, craft workshops were noisy but rhythmically ordered, and radio or printed pages structured much of leisure time. There was no single secret formula. That is the important point: sustained attention emerges from layered constraints more than from heroic willpower.
Small rituals that mattered
They had rituals that feel modest now and therefore easy to dismiss. A commuter who took a train to an office would arrive with a single notebook. A teacher would close the classroom door at 9 am and keep it closed until the next break. A painter in a studio kept a stack of unplayed records and a cigarette tin on the workbench and would not answer the phone during certain hours. These are not marketed methods. They look unimpressive when distilled into steps, but collectively they lowered fragmentation. Rituals did not aim for performance metrics. They aimed to preserve a contiguous flow of attention.
Deliberate practice without the label
Before psychologists gave it a label, many workers practiced what looks like deliberate practice. A lab technician repeated a procedure until their hands and eyes learned the trajectory. An apprentice carpenter did the same dovetail joint until the fingers remembered the pressure. Those repetitions were not logged as productivity wins. They were part of the job, a normal expectation. Importantly, the environment tolerated the focus required to improve. Interruptions were less frequent because processes and roles were more stable.
“The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.” Cal Newport Professor of Computer Science Georgetown University
This quote from Cal Newport is often quoted in self help circles but when you read the contexts in which people of the 70s trained it becomes less doctrinal and more embedded. Training happened by doing. The point is not to romanticize manual repetition. The deeper insight is that environments which implicitly reward continuous practice produce people who can sustain attention without conscious theatrics.
How boredom became productive
One of the stranger and less discussed shifts since the 1970s is how boredom changed its social meaning. In the 70s boredom was a tolerated state between tasks. People filled it with slow thinking. Today boredom is seen as a site of failure that must be optimised away with stimulation or content. The 70s allowed low level mental idling to act as a buffer. That buffer made reentry into deep work smoother.
Why we misread nostalgia
It feels tidy to blame technology alone for our attentional problems. The truth is messier. Technology amplified tendencies that were already present. Social expectations, workplace logistics and even urban rhythms determined whether attention would be scattered or contiguous. A city clerk in 1974 who had a furnace bill to process and no urgent messages likely settled into a long, quiet afternoon of categorising files. That pattern had less to do with virtue and more to do with design.
“What we are losing is the ability to pay deep attention to one thing over a prolonged period of time.” Nicholas Carr Author and Researcher the Shallows interview with PBS NewsHour
Carr points to neuroplasticity as an explanation for how media shape attention. His observation helps explain why those 70s habits mattered. The practices of attention at work rewired expectation and capacity. But his warning also underlines that changing environments can change minds in small cumulative steps. This is not a moral indictment. It is a causal account. We are built to adapt to our routines.
Not tricks but structural simplifications
Practical takeaway I defend here is structural simplification. Instead of asking what 70s people did as a series of rituals to be replicated like a to do list, imagine you are redesigning your day so it produces contiguous time. That means fewer context switches by design. That is not sexy. It is also not a trick. It is a commitment to remove certain forms of friction that fragment attention. In the 70s those frictions were often absent because roles and tools were simpler. We can remove some modern frictions without regressing to typewriters and dial phones.
What they resisted without knowing it
They resisted multitasking in the sense that their systems did not compel it. Societies then had more rigid boundaries between work and non work. That rigidity felt restrictive to some people and freeing to others. The point is not to replicate the restrictions but to understand their effect. A structural boundary sharpens attention. A blurred boundary diffuses it. We should be explicit about which we want and why.
A few honest objections
I am not arguing for a wholesale return to the past. Plenty about the 1970s was intolerable. Focus then was unequally distributed and often bound to privilege. Moreover, some modern tools increase capacity for complex attention. Video editing software, data visualisation and remote collaboration can support extended focused projects that would have been impossible before. The point of invoking the 70s is to recover a palette of practices that supported sustained attention while rejecting nostalgia as prescription.
Final refusal of false simplicity
There is no pill or gadget that will give you the kind of attention many people display in documentaries about typewritten novels or woodwork. Focus is less like a muscle and more like a social contract you make with yourself and with your surroundings. That contract is easier to keep when the environment enforces it gently. Building such an environment today requires choices that look boring: fewer open tabs, clearer role boundaries, designated quiet windows of time and permission to be unproductive for stretches. Doing those things will feel stubbornly ordinary. Good. Ordinary is underrated.
Summary table
| Aspect | 70s Condition | Modern Translation |
|---|---|---|
| Environment | Stable predictable routines. | Create regular undisturbed blocks of time and keep transitions intentional. |
| Practice | Repetition embedded in work tasks. | Design daily tasks so skill building is integral not separate. |
| Boredom | Tolerated as buffer. | Allow low stimulation gaps to support deep reentry. |
| Tools | Simpler single purpose tools. | Use fewer tools and assign each a clear role. |
| Boundaries | Clearer lines between roles and time. | Set explicit start stop norms for work and communication. |
FAQ
Did people in the 70s actually focus better than people today?
Not universally. Some people could sustain attention for long stretches because their lives and jobs enforced it. Others could not. The difference lies less in innate capacity and more in the surrounding scaffolding that made extended attention the path of least resistance. It is misleading to treat the 70s as an era of perfect concentration. It was a patchwork. The instructive part is identifying the patches where attention was supported and thinking how to rebuild them purposefully today.
Can modern workers create 70s style attention without leaving their jobs?
Yes but it requires negotiation. You have to design constraints into your day that your workplace accepts. That might look like protected deep work hours, clarified communication norms, or reducing unnecessary meetings. This is not about moralising being busy. It is about shifting expectations so that deep contiguous work becomes visible and valued rather than suspicious or rare.
Are any 70s practices harmful or irrelevant now?
Some practices were exclusionary or inefficient. Rigid role boundaries sometimes concealed abuses. Others made it harder for people with caregiving responsibilities to sustain focus. We must cherry pick. The useful elements are the structural ones that reduced fragmentation and allowed practice to accumulate. The harmful elements are the ones that enforced inequality or removed flexibility.
What role does boredom play in modern attention?
Boredom facilitates the mental reset that allows focused reentry into a task. In modern life we often replace boredom with low cost dopamine hits which short circuit reengagement. Resisting that urge is not heroic. It is strategic. Allowing small spans of unstructured quiet is a way to rebuild the ability to tolerate effortful concentration without panic or shame.
How fast can someone rebuild longer attention spans?
It varies. Some people notice improvements within weeks after they rework their environment and reduce interruptions. Others need months because neural habits and social patterns are resilient. The crucial step is consistency. Tiny structural changes repeated across weeks have a cumulative effect. There is no guaranteed timetable because lives differ, but steady environmental shifts produce measurable changes in the ability to sustain attention.
