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Productivity Is About Attention Management

nytimes.com

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Re: Productivity Is About Attention Management

#41

Post by mark_l_watson »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

Interesting take on it, I certainly resonate with the "Michigan weather making work the only thing to do" anecdote. I struggle with productivity, and feeling productive. and when I look back on times when I felt productive the attention thing does stand out. It occurred to me when I thought of myself as a younger programmer that I used to love the time between midnight and 3AM, there was literally nothing on TV to di…

Hey, I have enjoyed your comments over the years on HN, so I am happy to have some good advice to share with you: use something like Instapaper or a transient bookmark list to note interesting/useful things but do your reading just a few times a week. I find that this keeps me from link-following behavior that afterwards seemed like a waste of time. Make the saved link reading time special by setting aside reading time so I feel like I am doing just what I am supposed to be doing.

Re: Productivity Is About Attention Management

#42

Post by Lramseyer »

I really like where the writer is going with this, and I have had similar thoughts on the matter. I believe that a good user experience streamlines the flow of attention and tries to reduce "attention turbulence" for a given task. And I'm referring to more than just smartphone apps and web pages, though they make for great examples.

I wish more people realized the value of human attention. I would even go as far as to say that the reason that the tech industry is so profitable is because of it's ability to provide shortcuts for the attention required to complete a given task.

Re: Productivity Is About Attention Management

#43

Post by kumarvvr »

Bekwnn wrote: post #40
kumarvvr wrote: post #3

What the author means by "attention management" is, perhaps, the ability to concentrate for a long period of time. Personally, for work that i love to do, concentration is rewarding. For mundane, routine work, I usually go on auto pilot, getting work done, but, doing it while my attention is somewhere else. For mundane work that requires concentration, my output falls off the cliff. Its here that many tips and tricks…

The term "attention management" might not apply to everyone, too. I'm most effective when I'm in the zone, which usually comes easiest when I'm listening to music and rapidly flicking between things. My thought process works best when there's a fraction of distraction and when I'm in a playful mood, not when there are no distractions and not when the only thing in front of me is the task at hand. My thoughts slow dow…

Very interesting. Are you in a digital creative field or traditional creative field?

Re: Productivity Is About Attention Management

#44

Post by war1025 »

netwanderer3 wrote: post #28

There's a general misconception between being productive and being effective. One can fill their days by completing many mindless tasks and consider themselves as productive, but in the end hardly any of those tasks really matters. On the other hand, another person may only complete one or two tasks in a very short time during their day but these were critical tasks that could generate much higher values. This subseq…

Reminds me of when I was a kid and raced the same track over and over something like 1000 times on a game to get enough money to buy the fanciest car in the game rather than building my skills enough to do races where I would actually make decent money on each race and only have to do 5 or ten to buy said car.

Re: Productivity Is About Attention Management

#45

Post by zikzak »

ehead wrote: post #34
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience, try having enough projects in your belt that at least one of them has something actionable to do, and work on that while you ruminate on the other problem for a few days/weeks/months. Don't worry about getting anything done soon, prefer getting them done correctly and pick something else up when you get stuck. Also, don't forget that "staring into space for an hour while you think about a problem"…

This is my solution, but it feels like there should be a better way. I have replaced 'staring into space thinking' with taking a walk outside my office.

Unless you are rich enough to have chosen it, or maybe a prisoner, you always have more than one thing to do. Laundry, groceries, complex engineering, it all needs to be done.

I think our minds evolved to track all these things and, probably in a time sensitive way more than projected future value, to prioritize them. For this reason, I think having multiple projects is the natural state as the mind is optimized for this. So maybe this is the "best way" and explains a lot of the strange ways in which putting a problem aside can help solve it.

Re: Productivity Is About Attention Management

#47

Post by 1e-9 »

My most effective means of achieving a high level of work productivity is pleasure reading. It doesn't have to be anything deep. It just needs to be something I want to immerse myself in. The mental process I use to completely tune out the real world while reading for fun is the same one I use to reach a high level of productivity for work. Reading keeps it sharp. If I go too long without pleasure reading, my ability to focus on work suffers. Conversely, some of my most significant breakthroughs have occurred within a day or two of a crazy reading binge.

Re: Productivity Is About Attention Management

#48

Post by ianmcgowan »

cven714 wrote: post #22
revskill wrote: post #14

For most of technical works i do, concentration only happens AFTER i figure out what i need to do to solve the problem. Else most of the time, the "researching phase" is the most daunting task.

I have the exact same problem. When I know what needs to get done, even if it's tedious, it's not so bad to put my nose to the grindstone and work through it. But when I'm not sure how to approach a task, suddenly every distraction in the world is more appealing. You often see the suggestion to break up big tasks into smaller, baby step chunks to avoid this analysis paralysis. Doesn't help when I'm not even sure what…

I struggle with this too, and two things that help me are:

1) Start screen recording software and dictate your thoughts as you go through the research/brainstorming phase. Don't often go back and view the recorded sessions, it's the act of recording and speaking out loud that helps.

2) Comment driven development. Stub out functions just with comments, write deeper comment blocks inside a procedure where you have a rough idea of what needs to happen. I paste in table and API definitions as comments too, to avoid having to flip to a different screen which inevitably leads to distraction. Once the program is completely laid out in comment form, and compile/runs with just "STARTING" and "STOPPING" displaying, then I start implementing what's in the comments outside-in (from highest to lowest level). I run the program frequently while doing this, each successful compile/run is a small dopamine hit. As I'm going through, remove any comments that are duplicated by code - all that should remain are comments explaining "why".

Re: Productivity Is About Attention Management

#49

Post by arleny »

> A fascinating or funny video makes the data entry task seem even more excruciating, the same way a sweet dessert makes a sour vegetable taste yuckier.

For me it's the opposite. I often play videos in the background when I'm performing monotonous tasks and it seems to help me from getting completely distracted and abandon the task altogether.

Re: Productivity Is About Attention Management

#50

Post by wtvanhest »

netwanderer3 wrote: post #28

There's a general misconception between being productive and being effective. One can fill their days by completing many mindless tasks and consider themselves as productive, but in the end hardly any of those tasks really matters. On the other hand, another person may only complete one or two tasks in a very short time during their day but these were critical tasks that could generate much higher values. This subseq…

What makes it even more complicated is that in a big org, knowing which tasks are important changes over time and with managers and manager's managers.

Surviving and thriving over time requires constant reevaluation.

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