Article URL: https://glyphack.com/attention/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49032660 Points: 116 # Comments: 57

I’m feeling it right now. I had to set a timer for 15 minute on my computer and block all distractions to write this. If I didn’t force myself to focus I would easily get distracted by something after few minutes. Even when I’m doing things that I’ve been waiting to do it, I still feel the urge to do something else. I don’t know how and when this happened. During the last few years I was always studying, working, and doing open source. And actually got stuff done. Doing all of those at the same time requires paying attention to what I wanted to do and ignore the noise. Nowadays I’m lucky if I get 1 hour of focused time. Just to be clear, my goal is not to work 90 hours a week or anything crazy. That is not possible for me. I just want the hour I spend programming, learning, or writing to be just one activity. But instead I spend 10 minute on something then I get distracted, and try to focus again. Ideally, I want to be able to plan to work on something for long hours without any distraction. After that time get back online check for messages and other things. It feels like my brain finds a way to do something else and avoid painful situations like boredom or hard work. It reminds me of when I was in high school talking to a friend about how laying in bed with your phone can kill hours without you noticing it. It was circa 2015, back then attention hungry apps were less powerful but still lure a teenager’s mind for few hours. I learned that these apps should be used very carefully. At that time I made a decision to never have a charger near my bed. Back then it was mostly about my phone, because when I was on the computer I was either reading, or programming, or playing a game. Even if I wasn’t in the mood to think, I played a strategic game or chess. These activities exercise the mind and are fun. All of them were an intentional activity. I didn’t do any passive activities like browsing or chatting on my computer. Later I discovered HackerNoon and Medium, it was the first website that I was browsing whenever I was bored behind the computer. This meant that I had a way to get out boredom easily. It used to have some high quality content. It inspired me to do some projects and learn more programming. I found channels like CSDojo there. Nowadays I don’t even open them. They are filled with slop or click bait articles, probably because of monetization incentives. Then hackernews, and YouTube and others took their place. I also found some good people and blogs along the way. I learned to keep a reading list from people I like to read when I’m on the bus. I slowly found more activities for when I’m bored. This made it harder to focus on hard things for me. What kept me on track was that there was no way out. I had to work out some algebra problems. I kept myself to a very high bar of understanding what I do. And I did everything in LaTeX so I couldn’t copy from someone else. I was the only one typing them.