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I just started reading the book Lost Focus by Johaan Hari. It's a well-written deep dive on how we as a society have all lost the ability to concentrate on one thing for any good length of time. I'm only a few chapters in, but it's fascinating so far. Can recommend.
It’s called Refuse to Choose by Barbara Sher. She labels people like this as “scanners”. I’m not in the camp of reducing the dimensionality of humans to a single bucket/category but the description of what she calls a scanner really, really resonated with me.
I’ve found that I do start many many things and finish very few that I don’t need to. This is largely in my extracurricular time. At work and for work, I can finish things that I need to. The one takeaway from the book that helped me is this:
Maybe when you walk away from a project, you already got what you were looking for.
Maybe you already learned the thing that you wanted to learn and finishing the project wouldn’t do much more for you. And in some cases, I really believe this. For example, I always start little tech projects and I wanted to build a little audio modem in python to understand how digital modulation worked for old dial up modems. I got about 30% in and quit because at that time I had already learned quite a bit about how modulation works and finishing the project was really not interesting to me. The interesting part to me was the learning, not the finishing.
I’m always looking for similar people to chat to about this. Feel free to reach out. Email in profile.
Pomodoro. I don't always use it, but it really helps when I'm having trouble getting into a groove on a task. If my focus issues are partially due to tiredness, I make a point of keeping my eyes closed for all or part of the break periods. I normally pin a browser tab and allow alerts for this site: https://pomodor.app/timer I'm not affiliated, but it's simple and good. It's the only site I allow notifications from.
It hadn't worked for me previously because I thought it would be too much conscious effort, and I wanted a solution that would trick me into focusing.
However, I realized that many people, myself included, probably don't even get ~2hrs of focused work in a day (2hrs is a ballpark figure, no data to prove it).
Since then, I set timers of 25 minutes in which I'd just focus on what I'm supposed to do, and even though the first 15 minutes I drift off, thinking about something else, after a certain point the work that's in front of me is all I'm thinking about and I'm focusing effortlessly.
There are instances where I'm not focused, and I keep looking at the timer and waiting for it to get to 0. This is also great, since I still consider it somewhat productive that I stuck to just trying to do the work, instead of watching stuff on YT or browsing HN. This builds a little bit of self confidence.
The way I try to think is "I don't care what happens, unless it's a major emergency, I'm not letting anything distract me until this timer reaches 0".
I notice that the fact that I know a break is coming is very important tome. If break time wasn't involved, then I'd dread the whole experience because it wouldn't have any finality.
Do you have full time employment? I think you have to be aware of how limited our time is. If you have a full time job, there is very little time outside of that to do anything. The trouble is that a job also drains a lot of your energy, so working on anything on the side after work is going to put you at the edge of overdoing it. It's really hard to focus on this state as it is. Personally, I can get 4 good hours ou…
Ugh hits hard. At the moment I try to exercise for an hour a day, i'm learning to code in Swift with lessons that are roughly an hour a day and do an hour of guitar of guitar a day plus try to keep a few other things going and it's so difficult with a full time job, but else if you don't do it, life is just work and then home and repeat, how are you ever meant to develop yourself?
IT has normalized this idea that you do professional development in your free time, instead that on the job. This is not the case for many (most?) other areas.
Anybody in this position: ask your managers for time. Talk about expected career development. Invoke the Google 20% (yeah yeah, I know, not perfect, but still). We need to reclaim our free time as actually free from work of any sort, even if we like our work.
You don't need focus; you need to understand what your goal is . If you're dropping projects that look "unfinished" because, in reality, you've gotten what you want from them, that is fine. It only looks sloppy from the outside. If you're dropping projects before you get what you want from them, introspect on why. What's happening that leads you away? Address that . I recommend reading Barbara Sher's "Refuse to Choos…
-- Limit your time on social media to 20 minutes or less a day (LinkedIn/Facebook/Discord use that's related to work is an exception.) No studies exist yet to support this hypothesis, but it's my observation that longtime exposure to social media impedes overall focus. -- Limit your TV watching to one or two hours on the weekends, per week -- Limit video game use to one or two hours per week -- Find an activity you l…
-- Wake up early and try to accomplish something significant before 8am I always hate this piece of advice, if i wake up early, even if I am able to struggle through getting 'something significant done' before 8am i'm going to feel terrible for the rest of the day since i got up early, it's not worth it at all. This advice is nonsense and not universal, yet the same nonsense is constantly repeated. I understand it ca…
After you get in the habit of it, the time available in a day feels almost doubled.
And there's (I suppose) the benefit of working fasted which generally enhances focus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_(development)
the basic idea is "finish what you start" and "you can only have a certain number of projects going at once" so you don't start anything unless there is room on the board.
Kanban is the most basic approach to management and it applies to a wide range of applications. For instance at the cafe in the building next to mine the people who make food keep track of how many orders they have in flight and don't take a new order until the queue is short enough.