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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

#121

Post by flogistonical »

cryptopian wrote: post #86

Something I really grew to hate over my time at various software firms were complex and flaky stacks with big test loops, and it's exactly this kind of reason why. Ideally, I have a problem, I want to put my head in the problem space and stay focused there until it's done. Every time a test suite takes five minutes to run, or I have to look up some obscure docs in my web browser, or I have to go somewhere else to reb…

Traction between intention and result is the most powerful tool in the brain's kit. We are made to spin our wheels often, it's adversarial.

Gain and keep traction. Attention is our most valuable resource. If you chose what you attend to, you can achieve at the limit of your physical and mental potential. If you attend to what others wish you attend to, you will be ceding the difference to parasitic systems.

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#123

Post by al_borland »

dwedge wrote: post #107
al_borland wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I’d like to leave my phone in another room while working, 2FA has made that impossible. I’m now required to keep my phone nearby and pick it up periodically throughout the day, all in the same of security.

I worked around this by just storing the 2FA in Bitwarden. Yeah, same place as the passwords but I don't care I don't want the forced context switch.

A coworker tried to use Authy a couple years ago and it wouldn't work. It seemed like we were forced to use Microsoft Authenticator.

I just tried setting it up with Apple Passwords and it wouldn’t accept the QR code. It seems to be specifically made for Microsoft.

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#124

Post by timacles »

al_borland wrote: post #105
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…

As much as I’d like to leave my phone in another room while working, 2FA has made that impossible. I’m now required to keep my phone nearby and pick it up periodically throughout the day, all in the same of security.

Just make your phone boring.

Delete instagram, log out and don’t go on YouTube. Delete games.

It’s really not that hard to make your phone a device for communication and not entertainment

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#125

Post by jorisw »

noir_lord wrote: post #99
aktau wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respect. I hope to find the strength to be more like that. Also to give a better example to others. I notice making the screen go grayscale (can configure volume up+down to do this in android) already makes doom-anything much less long-lived. The next step, since apparently I can't go cold turkey, is to try one of these alternative minimalist launchers to see if it helps. And to teach people that if they want somethi…

> And to teach people that if they want something from me urgently, they need to call. There is a half way step (on Android at least, I assume Apple has similar) you can set "Do Not Disturb" and then white list the people who can message/call through the "Do Not Disturb" so you are reachable but only by people you trust/want to be able to reach you. > On the topic of watches, I used a smartwatch the company gifted me…

I do the Do Not Disturb + whitelist thing on my iPhone.

I also disable any and all notifications of apps other than direct messaging apps. No group message notifications.

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#126

Post by jorisw »

AaronAPU wrote: post #58
oggreen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very interesting perspective but now that you mention it, I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed, even when I'm not on a device. Curious if phone usage or whatever doom-scrolling we do exhausts the same part of the brain that we use to daydream.

I think its unfortunate people wear headphones while walking/running/biking. If you don’t, that’s however many minutes or hours of nothing but daydreaming (and hearing nature).

I often just wear noise cancelling headphones without any music on

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#127

Post by marginalia_nu »

coffeefirst wrote: post #117
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 smart. It's also revealing. It was a choice to make technology that absolutely hammers you with information. It was not the right choice. I want to build and use stuff that promotes focus. I only have a vague inkling of what this means, but it's quieter, less instantaneous. And it's going to be an uphill battle because everyone else is doing the opposite.

A lot of the choices were to be fair quite accidental. Computers didn't use to be like this, but a lot of the reasons they weren't were properties of how the technology worked. A low-DPI 15" CRT monitor simply can't display very much information at any given moment. A slow single core CPU just doesn't permit browsing the web while your code is compiling. As that changed, we simply piled on multitasking capabilities without asking if we should.

But yeah, it's an interesting space to experiment in. I feel we could be doing much of this a lot better than we are now. My mise-en-place work accounts is very much a hack, and considerable work to set up.

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#128

Post by jorisw »

morelandjs wrote: post #114

Unsolicited endorsement, but I bought a “Brick” device recently, and I can’t recommend it enough for cutting back on social media. Infinite scroll really destroys your ability to concentrate.

I wish people could just admit to themselves how irrelevant all this social media content is, lose interest, and keep the apps shut (or uninstall in case there's no DM feature that keeps it installed). I can't imagine needing to switch devices for this.

I couldn't give a single shit what friends or acquaintances (much less strangers) are doing in their free time day to day. They can tell me next time I see them. I have Instagram installed, but only because certain people message me there. I never scroll even a pixel.

My biggest distraction? Hacker News.

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#129

Post by randusername »

I have almost the exact opposite problem.

My focus is as strong as ever, maybe stronger, but as time goes on I notice that it is harder and harder for me to gracefully respond to interruptions.

It's pretty damaging to my relationships. Everyone expects you to drop everything and give people attention and empathy and be the perfect active listener. But I need a cooldown or a change of scenery to leave a task behind.

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#130

Post by schaefer »

My wireless router runs OpenWRT, one day after a particularly embarrassing YouTube binge, I turned on the adblock plugin on my router and configured it to block YouTube as an ad.

It’s turned out to be the best thing I’ve done for myself in a long, long time.

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