Ask HN: I feel like I've destroyed my attention span. How do I get it back?

Reading novels seems to help for me. More directly, there’s always meditation.

Meditation is frequently mentioned in this context, is there a specific meditation design for for attention span ?

Meditation is, essentially, concentrating on one thing (e.g. one's breathing, a phrase) for an extended period. It's kind of like using a piece of gym equipment to exercise just one set of muscles, repeatedly. So, how does one increase attention span? Practice paying attention, in an environment with fewer distractions, and keep practicing until you become good at it again (don't expect that to happen quickly).

Also, you accidentally put "it" instead of "I" in the question. Perhaps related?

There is a basic meditation technique where you just lightly focus your attention on your breath. When you notice you’re not thinking of your breath, which will happen 10s to 100s of times a minute, typically, you bring your focus back to your breath.

It’s incorporated into a general school called “mindfulness” which you read more about. A book I’d recommend for beginners is “The Joy of Living” by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.

The theory is that training your mind to focus on something mundane like your breath for 10 minutes, you will generally train the capacity of your mind to direct focus.

This greater focusing ability will come in handy when you want to focus on other specific things without being distracted as easily, like listening to someone in a conversation or going through the debugging process for a bug.

This will sound sarcastic, but it’s not.

Stop visiting HN more than once a day. Repeat this for every “news”/“feed” site and app that you use. It sounds completely nuts, but it forces you to stop slicing up “read the news” (a focused activity) into “read the news distractedly” (a timesliced activity).

Shut off push notifications for anything that is not money/shipping related or a direct IM with individuals. Email notifications off, news and feed notifications off, social site notifications off, Twitter “favorited” notifications off.

Turn off notification sounds for everything that’s left except direct messages from human beings or e.g. Pagerduty.

Aside from direct IMs — I got a total of 10 pushes yesterday. None made a sound. None required a response. None required interrupting my focus.

Do this for a month, on desktops, laptops, mobile. Your focus will improve dramatically, simply for having not wasted all your brain’s dopamine on “new email alert sounds”.

EDIT: Meditation is far more challenging when your brain is constantly looking out for the next “new notification” ding. It took me nearly a month to overcome the Pavlov ding response when I first implemented this approach in 2005. You’re going to hear a lot of phantom dings for a long time.

EDIT2: If you haven’t already done this muting approach, set your push notification sound to the red alert klaxon from BSG (three repetitions) – or any red alert sound from any sci-fi show. If ever there was a way to amplify the visceral effects of notification sounds to your conscious thought level for evaluation and consideration, that’ll do it.

EDIT3: If you’re autism spectrum, you may have “executive dysfunction”, which is a willpower disorder of sorts. Focus is willpower-related. There’s no magic fix, but awareness is half the battle, and it may offer steps you can take to reduce your life’s “willpower” drain so that you can have more of it for “focus” instead of whatever.