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It's getting harder to focus every day

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Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#61

Post by hnlmorg »

hgomersall wrote: post #43
ssl-3 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's only one important thing that I miss about smoking: A smoke break was an excuse that was tolerated by others, wherein I could go outside and just let my mind wander (daydream) with no particular goal for a short period of time. Daydreaming should be perfectly acceptable either way, but people seem to think it's weird (concerning, even) when someone spends a bit of time to stand (or sit) around while appearing…

You can get the same effect by going for a walk.

It’s an option, but it’s worth noting that you’re not always idling your brain in quite the same way unless you happen to work somewhere were there are no roads to cross, cars and cyclists to dodge, nor other pedestrians to navigate around.

I sometimes find toilet breaks or coffee breaks (waiting for kettle to boil) fill the “daydream debugging” requirement. But that depends on having a clean bathroom with enough stalls, or an empty kitchen without other people making drinks.

Working from home definitely helps here. Though significantly less so during the holidays when kids are off.

Edit: just in case there’s any misunderstanding, I’m not suggesting having the kids around is a bad thing. I love my kids. Just that they have an obvious impact to my concentration.

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#62

Post by ssl-3 »

mysterydip wrote: post #52
hgomersall wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get the same effect by going for a walk.

I think they’re saying that you could say “I’m going for a smoke break” at work and it was at least tolerated. I don’t think you can say “I’m going for a walk” the same way.

Indeed.

It has varied a bit depending on the timeline, but: Going out for a walk (or to just change environments and very passively stare at nothing) has been less socially-acceptable than going out for a smoke, in my experience.

One of these things is weird, or perhaps inducing of ire ("How dare he just go outside when he feels like it! What is he even doing?").

The other is, at worst, both understandable and disgusting ("Of course he's out there again with that filthy habit!").

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#63

Post by shafyy »

lardosaurusrex wrote: post #4

People often question me how I manage to focus for more than a few minutes and I'm always confused because back in the day I was constantly informed I didn't have any focus and needed to be treated (adhd). I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored. I think it's still an issue with people b…

Reminds me of this scene from Curb where Jeff just sits in the plane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zONvxznbUJA

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#65

Post by jrmg »

maguay wrote: post #15

Strangely I think it's why I like roadtrips so much. Sitting doing absolutely nothing for even 15 minutes is difficult for me, but I can drive for hours doing nothing but watching the world go by, even without music or podcasts on, and it's fine. And that feels good.

Plane flights.

I hope the ‘free internet all the time’ era that airlines have been threatening us with for a decade now never arrives.

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#66

Post by fireflash38 »

mysterydip wrote: post #52
hgomersall wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get the same effect by going for a walk.

I think they’re saying that you could say “I’m going for a smoke break” at work and it was at least tolerated. I don’t think you can say “I’m going for a walk” the same way.

Why not? Ive been doing it for years, when I worked in office. Get someone to go with you. Or walk to get food/coffee/whatever.

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#67

Post by marginalia_nu »

wormpilled wrote: post #24
marginalia_nu wrote: post #2

I think it's just information overload. There's so much information everywhere now clamoring at you for attention. Our brains aren't made for processing this much information. Going on a media diet helps. Going completely offline helps even more. Something I do when I struggle to focus is to add different stripped down user accounts to my computer. I wanted to dabble in rust so I added a user called ~rs that literall…

That's a really cool technique. > Yeah I can just log out and scroll HN, but there's a enough friction to that, that it doesn't really happen very often. You can make sure the friction is high by having your password be something difficult to remember, written down on a note, and keeping that note somewhere "out of reach".

I don't think it's helpful to increase the friction more than it already is, then it just becomes annoying, which makes it more likely you'll stop working like this. You don't have to become a desert father to fix your attention.

My hypothesis is that what's hurting focus and attention is context and task switching. It too easy to open a bunch of tabs and get stuck in the xkcd loop[1] whenever you get stuck or something gets a bit boring, so that becomes a thing you do without thinking about it.

Having mise-en-place workspaces where things that aren't necessary for what you are doing are out of reach, and reaching for them means you have to log off and lose your state, is generally more than sufficient to fix the problem.

It's not that you can't ever check your socials or scroll HN (that wouldn't work for me as part of running a business is a digital presence), you just can't do it while working on something. Makes everything just a little bit more deliberate.

(Also on a practical note, chrome/chromium in app mode is great for this, if you do need to be able to go online, but in a limited sense)

[1] https://xkcd.com/1411/

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#68

Post by safety1st »

kuerbel wrote: post #39
noir_lord wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed About 5 minutes ago for me, my missus says that I live with my head in the clouds (which is a nicer way of saying if I'm not actively doing something I just zone out and retreat into my own head), I've always been that way all the way back to school (with the inevitable consequences from teachers). I've mentioned on here before though that I never got addicted to my…

I'm not sure I have the willpower to follow your example but at least I managed to turn of notifications on my watch after reading your post.

Willpower's not the solution. When we isolated cocaine from the coca leaf for the first time, the world pretty much went insane. In those first years people were injecting it into their eyeballs and spines. The most popular beverage on earth in 2026 STILL contains extract of the coca leaf as a holdover from the days when it was laced with its namesake, Coke. People were smoking cocaine, ingesting cocaine, giving it to their kids for a toothache, pretty much anything you could stick it in, they did.

The solution to this wasn't willpower, it was to get rid of all that fucking cocaine. There's a reason you don't have the stuff lying around your house today, if you did you'd probably get hooked. In 2026 we're basically speedrunning the coke boom with infotech.

So once again the solution is: get rid of it. Any time you're in a low stimulus environment, remove the tech so that you don't HAVE to exercise willpower. That means turning off the phone and the watch and maybe stuffing them in a drawer in another room or something. That's all it takes.

I can't say how society will look back at this moment in history 150 years from now. But I do know I'm way happier and more relaxed when I just shut off the devices and put them away. When I'm at home or in the office, my phone's on mute, in a drawer/bag/other room, and I don't think about it unless I take it out for a few minutes to order a delivery or do a 2fa or something. At night it's simply turned off. I'll never own a smart watch. I still keep the phone on me when I go out and haven't found that to be a huge concern because if I'm at a bar or something it's competing with a lot of other stimuli for attention. We were never 100% available to anyone for all of human history until the last 10-20 years. I am not opting into this current Cocaine Moment.

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#69

Post by chakintosh »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #16

Living in Seattle saved me. In the winter months I started waking up and sitting in front of a SAD light for half an hour. I almost immediately got bored so I started reading long-form books (with the occasional short story) in front of the light for an hour each morning. I gave up on facebook in 2010 and twitter in 2020ish. I never developed the habit for other social media. I turn off slack and email for the first…

[flagged]

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#70

Post by CamelCaseName »

roncesvalles wrote: post #46
graemep wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I am not sure it is as similar to sleep as you claim, but its definitely good for your brain. I say something similar in the context of parenting, that a reasonable amount of boredom is good. I think it likely that being constantly entertained makes people more prone to seek constant stimulation. This did not start with phones either. I am Gen X and it happened in my childhood with kids being dumped in front…

I remember when cable TV used to be "addictive". Now I can't watch even 10 minutes of it without getting bored and pulling out my phone. Also something I learned recently: checking your phone at the movies is no longer the faux pas that it used to be. There's definitely some hedonic treadmill type thing going on with attention and stimuli.

Please never check your phone while the film is playing. Major faux pas.
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