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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

#151

Post by Svennor »

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…

Absolutely. There is no more boredom in today's world. Not a second. But boredom is important for the mind to rest.

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#152

Post by mritchie712 »

gullywhumper wrote: post #148

It seems that so many minor parts of the day don't work as expected and my attention is destroyed by a thousand annoyances. My watch only unlocks my computer 1/3 of the time. My car only recognizes my phone 1/2 of the time. 3/4 of the time I go to press/click on a song I want to hear, the data in the UI updates between the time I start to move to the song and I press/click and I end up hearing something I don't want.…

my car has an AI assistant. I don't know what the wake word is, but it will wake up and be useless with no obvious way to turn it off. I'm sure I could search for it, but it happens while I'm driving and I forget about it. It happens just infrequently enough to not remember, but often enough to be really annoying.

My wife turned on a meditation feature on our very old Alexa. I guess the app was deleted or something, but every morning Alexa turns on and says "Starting your meditation times ... Sorry, this is no longer available". If I tell Alexa to turn this off, it has no idea what I'm talking about and it shows up nowhere in the iOS app. Instead of meditation, I got a nice dose of minor annoyance every morning.

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#153

Post by maccard »

ssl-3 wrote: post #76
fireflash38 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn't sound so bad. I like chatting with people I know. I like coffee. Food is nice. Except: My involvement in these activities doesn't leave much, if any, room for the kind of detachment that daydreaming requires.

The group needs to be big enough (6+ people) that you’re not just chatting with someone; you’re part of a group and can drift in and out .

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#154

Post by graemep »

ryandrake wrote: post #135
Melonai wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think the difference is between "using your phone", meaning calling someone and audibly talking to someone, thus disrupting the movie for others, and "checking your phone", which is just looking at it, though inaudibly, though there might be some amount of light pollution depending on the screen brightness. First one has and will continue to be taboo, second one however, in my experience, used to be viewed with dista…

As someone who miraculously doesn’t feel this urge to constantly “check” his phone, I have to ask: what are you people “checking” for, exactly? It’s still there—it hasn’t gone anywhere. Is it the notifications? Why not just turn them off? I can assure you that there’s nothing on your phone that can’t wait an hour or so until the movie is done. Out of 10,000 people “checking” their phones, probably around 1 of them is…

I think checking your phone unless you are actually expecting an important notification is a symptom of the problem we are discussing here.

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#155

Post by maccard »

tetha wrote: post #83
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…

Some of my deepest architectural work honestly happened... in a hammock on the balcony, while alternating between staring at a cloud, the sun, and two magpies building a nest in the birch tree while yelling at me occasionally. Then I came back to my desk, saw that I had missed a call or two from my boss and he had a concerned message of where I was. I ignored that and sent him an architecture document an hour later.…

One of my earlier startups, I was a junior/mid level software engineer. I took a skive day to WFH, but was actually travelling to a gig on the train. I sketched out something to pretend I was working that day, and sent him a photo of it. We ended up shipping that design and I only really made one major mistake that we fixed in v2.

It’s amazing how much value there is in idleness.

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#156

Post by threetonesun »

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.

I've worked a number of places where smoking on site wasn't allowed, and it was well accepted that if you wanted to just disappear for 30 minutes once or twice a day no one would care.

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#157

Post by projektfu »

Hallowell and Ratey, who write about ADHD, suggested a new entity for the current world: VAST, the variable attention stimulus trait. It is like ADHD but it is culturally induced and not presumed to be due to an innate deficiency in executive function.

"Beyond the sources of biologically based ADHD, there are a lot of people who act as if they have ADHD but on close inspection turn out not to have the diagnosable condition. These are the people who have ADHD-like symptoms caused by the conditions of modern life. Their “ADHD” is a response to the massive increase in stimuli that now bombard our brains and our world....

"Modern life has trained our brains to go faster and faster, to do more and more, to receive and transmit 24/7, and to require constant stimulation—be it from movies, TV, conversation, even news, as well as the minute-to-minute living of our lives. Most of us can go no more than a few seconds without looking for a screen."

It is likely to me that different people have different breaking points, and so one person may recognize the introduction of the smartphone or debut of TikTok as the point where they lost the ability to focus, and another may date it to the rise of LLMs.

Hallowell, E. M., & Ratey, J. J. (2021). ADHD 2.0: New science and essential strategies for thriving with distraction—from childhood through adulthood.

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#158

Post by projektfu »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #127
coffeefirst wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Before 1992, we browsed newsgroups, watched TV, or played with swords while compiling. That is, if you weren't using Turbo Pascal, with its near-instantaneous turnaround.

https://xkcd.com/303/

Re: It's getting harder to focus every day

#159

Post by vaylian »

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.

Consider getting a hardware key (typical example: YubiKey)
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