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Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

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Re: Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

#111

Post by bluGill »

vegetablepotpie wrote: post #8

> Cal Newport said it best in his book Deep Work: the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive. The people who cultivate that skill, stay up late at night while everyone is asleep so they don’t get distracted. T…

The problem with deep thought is you can waste a lot of time thinking about something that is no longer important. If your project is doomed to be canceled for reason outside your control there is no difference in output between someone who does nothing (ie should be fired for lack of work) and someone spends his days working hard.

Those who do better networking tend to be onto those trends. They will find out about opportunities where 10 minutes of focused work will net a large [sale, or other win for the company] for the. 10 minutes of the right work can be far more valuable than a whole month of deep focused work. (though that 10 minutes probably builds on - and takes credit for - someone else's months of deep work)

There is no clear win here. However if you like to be a deep focus person you should force yourself to spend some time every week figuring out the pulse of the company so you are at least doing useful work.

Re: Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

#112

Post by tester756 »

potatoman22 wrote: post #94
tester756 wrote: post #77

20 yo with flip phone and used smartphone maybe for 2 days, ama? when it sucks: * sending photos - rarely needed for me, but when I need it I "kinda really" need it, but you can probably work around it by buying better flip phone * not seeing emojis in SMS * when you need quick access to internet e.g for map, some info. I never needed it(I try to remember pathes/ways either via map or google maps or just ask people a…

Do you find it hard to connect to people without services like FaceTime, Snapchat, Messenger, or Whatsapp? I'm a similar age and so much of my socializing takes place on digital platforms like those, especially during COVID.

> Do you find it hard to connect to people without services like FaceTime, Snapchat, Messenger, or Whatsapp? I'm a similar age and so much of my socializing takes place on digital platforms like those, especially during COVID.

Shockingly SMS works fine, nobody ever had problem with it.

>Messenger

I use FB like once a week on my PC/Laptop because I'm studying and unfortunely it is must have

>I'm a similar age and so much of my socializing takes place on digital platforms like those, especially during COVID.

on my PC/Laptop I use a lot of VoIPs like Ts3/Discord, but in 90% of the cases with people from the Internet, so it's hard to relate.

You're probably right, but I do not use them (insta, snap, ...) so I'm not aware of what I do lose

Re: Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

#113

Post by lioeters »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #39

I'm constantly amazed at how the mainstream population uses phones. Most people tend to have phone with alarming-notifications, so they get informed that they have a message, or email or whatever. The phone interrupts them and directs their attention. They train themselves to be controlled by their phones. I'd go crazy trying to live like that. I have no audible notifications, and vibration only for actual calls. Eve…

Glad to see there are other people like me, who use a phone like "receiving a letter" - no interruptions, just checking it occasionally when I'm not busy.

Re: Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

#114

Post by beckingz »

birdyrooster wrote: post #80
beckingz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conjoined rectangle of success.

Damn you for beating me to this joke format. And I’m not deleting it.

Do we expand the rectangle to have a dimension for speed?

Re: Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

#115

Post by t-writescode »

vegetablepotpie wrote: post #8

> Cal Newport said it best in his book Deep Work: the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive. The people who cultivate that skill, stay up late at night while everyone is asleep so they don’t get distracted. T…

The way you describe the harm it causes to the employees sounds, to me, like a managerial problem.

My company has several of those "works late, comes in late" employees, and none of them are seen as lazy.

We have managers that recognize and re-enforce to the other teams the work that we do and the people we unblock and the wins that we're able to make.

I just completed one of my own reviews where I was lauded loudly as a person that unblocks other people - while my own official tasks are relatively light because my primary task has become unblocking others - and a coworker was recently promoted due to her weird, off-hour work.

Why? Management understood our strengths and re-enforces them, protects us from nay-sayers and rejoices openly about the work that we do.

That way, we can keep working in the areas we're good at, in the way we're good at it, and we're given the recognition for our work through our managers.

With a good manager, you shouldn't have to be constantly trumpeting your own skill, they should be revealing it for you.

Managers, and I'm sure many of you are here on Hacker News, this is one of your many, many jobs.

Re: Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

#116

Post by EGreg »

wccrawford wrote: post #33
temp0826 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work." I really like this for a different reason. It’s one of the reasons I can appreciate flat-earthers (or other discordian-ish reality tunnels) from a slightly more philosophical standpoint: it really doesn’t matter

That quote has always bothered me. He uses incredibly small details to deduce incredible things, but thinks the solar system will never have any influence upon his casework. I can imagine scenarios where people thought the wrong things because of what the sun was doing, how far the sun was from the earth at the time, etc etc. It does matter, just not often... Much like the rest of what he uses to deduce things. It's…

The show Sherlock shows that actually this solar system knowledge helps him in the end of the episode :)

Re: Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

#117

Post by [deleted] »

ryandrake wrote: post #93
Swizec wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you spend your time marketing your self to others and letting people know your accomplishments, or do you spend the time doing work that will benefit others? I like the luck surface area analogy for this. Take a rectangle. Side A is "Quality of work". Side B is "How many people know about it". The surface area – A*B – is your luck and opportunity. If you do amazing work and nobody knows about it, your luck is ze…

I like this model, but I'd replace side B with "how much you self promote your work". Someone who's side A is 1 and side B is 20 has similar opportunity as someone whose side A is 20 and side B is 1. A talented developer who isn't great at self promotion gets the same luck as someone who doesn't know what they are doing at all but can talk a great talk and enchant the execs. Surely 10x10 is better but you can linearl…

[deleted]

Re: Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

#118

Post by dmingod666 »

pc86 wrote: post #88
vegetablepotpie wrote: post #8

> Cal Newport said it best in his book Deep Work: the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive. The people who cultivate that skill, stay up late at night while everyone is asleep so they don’t get distracted. T…

You're making huge assumptions that a) people who cultivate this skill are late night folks and not morning people; b) people who cultivate this skill are unable to do deep work during the day; c) even ignoring the fallacies in A and B, that these folks' counterparts are blind to their accomplishments and assume they're lazy because they come in late; d) that someone cannot be capable of both completing meaningful de…

Yes, you can do deep work late at night.

The elephant in the room question is - "what are you doing during the time that is allocated for work?"

I think deep-work is then a secondary thing. The person needs to solve other more important problems first.

1) are you over-commiting? 2) Should you be more assertive with taking up more work? 3) Are you able to set expectations of people that wait for your work and then also communicate when there are delays? 4) Do you have problems delegating work? 5)...

Re: Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

#119

Post by benhurmarcel »

asdff wrote: post #35
aramachandran7 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd imagine those are designed with keeping your focus on the road in mind, by doing things like limiting notifications to only incoming phone calls while you're driving

Having to navigate menu systems to change basic climate controls would say otherwise

Then the problem is the car, not the console UI.

Re: Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

#120

Post by swiley »

aramachandran7 wrote: post #7
rib3ye wrote: post #2

Yet no mention of car center console UI.

I'd imagine those are designed with keeping your focus on the road in mind, by doing things like limiting notifications to only incoming phone calls while you're driving

Unfortunately your imagination doesn't correspond well with reality.

They also display texts, have tons of different entertainment integrations, display maps etc. All with crazy high input latency, zero tactile feedback, and a completely homegrown UI to leave you constantly guessing and reading whenever you do simple things like change the radio station.

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