Attention is your scarcest resource

https://www.benkuhn.net/attention/

by adambyrtek • 6 years ago

674 172 6 years ago

I also find that 100 things to do as a manager is a misconception. Doing 100 things well in a day is impossible. Picking the 3 to do super-well and doing those. Yields the best results.

Especially because those 3 are unlikely to come back.

roughly• 6 years ago

I found being really clear with myself about the things I was Not going to take care today was really valuable - it made it much easier to pull my focus back to what I was working on if I knew the other stuff was “scheduled” for another day.

ehnto3• 6 years ago

Likewise, it's very freeing to completely rid yourself of a task mentally so that you can focus on the tasks at hand.

Part of it is trusting that future me can get it done properly. A trusting partner with which to delegate the task to.

dredmorbius• 6 years ago

That's a key lesson of Getting Things Done. Pick three tasks.

graeme3• 6 years ago

He mentions timeboxing. Does anyone know of a good way to do this on ios with certain sites?

The built in blocking with downtime is nowhere near granular enough, and it is rather easy to turn off. Do any third party browsers or apps have schedules for viewing certain sites?

Eg on mac I have an app, coldturkey, which blocks certain urls during the workday.

eloff3• 6 years ago

I tend to use /etc/hosts to block sites on my desktop, like YouTube or HN. YouTube DNS itself is somehow special because it stays cached for new browser windows. So I further cripple it with ublock origin by disabling JavaScript.

I can undo these things easily enough, but it's sufficient that my monkey brain can't just open a tab and go there without my conscious permission ( which disturbingly is how habit forming these sites are for me.)

I keep them available on my mobile, but I have an old, slow phone and I never keep it on my desk, I put it out of reach and with notifications on silent.

For things like Facebook and Instagram my solution is simply to delete my account and never let that abomination steal precious minutes of my life. I don't miss them at all.

baby2• 6 years ago

I do the same, but recently I've tried something else that actually works! I turn the Wi-Fi off on my laptop. It's such a stupid trick, as I can just turn it back on, but it usually is enough of a friction to make me think twice "wait, am I ready to procrastinate?"

dllthomas2• 6 years ago

I use a tiling window manager called ratpoison. Much like tmux or screen, there is a single key that says "I am talking to you, WM" and then the next key is looked up in a key map.

Something I've done is bind a key that changes my top-level key map to a pared down version that only has meta, a command to tell me the time, access to my music controls, and a way back to my main key map. Of course I can still get to anything on my computer with just a little effort, but the additional friction is sometimes useful for staying on task.

rement• 6 years ago

PSA: /etc/hosts does not work on Firefox unless you turn off the "DNS over HTTPS" setting [0]. Spent a good hour trying to figure out why Firefox was ignoring my /etc/hosts file one day.

[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-dns-over-https

adav2• 6 years ago

I use NextDNS on my iPhone to block distracting sites (and privacy stuff etc). It's quick enough to disable briefly for a false-positive but annoying enough to stop me mindlessly browsing Hacker News on the toilet all day...

graeme3• 6 years ago

Thanks! Is that something you have to configure on a mac/pc? I see no website blocking options on iphone.

Edit: nevermind, found it. You configure a custom id on their site, then enter that in the app

There aren’t any scheduling features, correct?

elliekelly• 6 years ago

It’s not exactly what you’re looking for but you might like FocusMate[1] which sets you up with a (mostly) silent video chat partner to work for an hour and then report back what you’ve accomplished. You won’t want to be the dingus who reports back that you’ve done nothing but screw around for hour. I’ve found it’s helpful in getting me started on something and then once the session is over I’m able to keep going.

[1]https://www.focusmate.com/

Insanity2• 6 years ago

Does anyone else have experience to me? It sounds odd to me but might work.

chrisco255• 6 years ago

I recommend the Forest app. It works on both desktop and mobile and allows you to block sites as well as apps and sync your preferences between accounts. I will usually set a 2 hour timer while I need to focus.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/forest-stay-focused/id86645051... https://www.forestapp.cc/

graeme3• 6 years ago

It still just blocks everything, right? Like, all or nothing, no way to make a calendar appointment or send a message, but keep web blocked.

einpoklum2• 6 years ago

Ah, the irony of saying this to people like us, wasting our attention like there's no tomorrow on the odd news story on HN :-)

crehn• 6 years ago

What is it about HN that makes it feel much more productive than other similar sites?

hinkley6• 6 years ago

Lower troll ratio perhaps?

inetsee• 6 years ago

The promise of "The Silver Bullet". You'll find an article that will tell you how to be more creative, more productive, happier. You'll create the next unicorn business, get filthy, stinking rich, and have everyone wanting to be your friend.

Of course, your best bet for achieving these goals would be to spend less time reading HN and more time actually "Doing the Work".

kempbellt• 6 years ago

An ironic post indeed. There's a valuable message here: Give me your attention for a moment so I can teach you to protect your attention.

Like a move baddie saying, "Trust me when I tell you: Don't trust anyone" <- this the bad guy right here. You don't need to watch the rest of the movie.

TLDR: If you value your attention and want to respect the intention of the article, don't read it ;)

taway738039• 6 years ago

the article does mention "TIMEBOX BULLSHIT"; anyone has had success with that, or has tips for the same? the reason I'm asking is, I've tried in the past at the cost of not looking at "bullshit", but it just keeps getting piled up to a point where people start making mountains out of molehills.

vinceguidry• 6 years ago

Time boxing is when you spend X amount of time to either get it done or get it off your plate. If it’s piling up, then you’re not really time boxing. Push back on whoever wants you to do it if it’s really bullshit or hand it to a report or coworker if you still have to do it.

If you can’t do either then you have to treat it like a priority and not something that can be time boxed.

hh3k0• 6 years ago

It took a while for me to train my friends not to instant message me [...]

Ha. I hope said friends are not reading his blog.

ehnto3• 6 years ago

I feel like it's the wrong approach anyway. Just keep the instant messages on silent, and check them when you have some personal time. Training people to never message you is a good way to lose some of the spontaneity of friendship.

I say that as a massive luddite in this regard, I hate always-on culture. But I learned you have to make some concessions, because your friends will use what's convenient to them and the harder you make it the easier you disconnect them from you. Real friendships aren't built in a day, and you'll be stifling every relationship you try to build if you don't meet them half-way.

burlesona3• 6 years ago

I think the most salient point of this blog is pretty much buried as the closing thought. It’s pretty hard to be a good engineering manager when you also have programming responsibilities (IC work). Sure, you can debate about what the different hacks are to try and work around this and do a good job in spite of the difficulty, but it’s a lot easier to just go full-time managing.

In my experience it takes six or more people to fully occupy a manager. Ten seems to be about perfect. You can go higher than that (and many do) but at a certain point you’re not evenly investing in all your people anymore, you’re mostly focusing on a few at a time.

Obviously the hardest part of this is if you don’t have 6+ people to manage. My answer to very small teams is not to have a manager at all, just have a technical lead and trust that a group of 1-5 people can work out their own crap.

justicezyx2• 6 years ago

Agree

The more I move away engineering, the more I feel the unreliability of human beings, and its stark contraction to machines.

Of cuz, machines, when sufficiently complex, becomes unreliable as well. But by operating still within that boundary, one can already do exceptionally things.

People managers essentially are dealing with a completely different entities than machines. Rarely one can operate on 2 different entities and still perform exceptionally.

an_opabinia• 6 years ago

Y’all might not be machines but you’re definitely cogs.

amelius• 6 years ago

In my experience it takes six or more people to fully occupy a manager. Ten seems to be about perfect.

Aha, so it takes one full-time manager to manage one 10x programmer ...

alexchamberlain2• 6 years ago

Is that a team of 10 without the communication overhead?

In all seriousness, is it time to get rid of the 10x meme? People have strengths and weaknesses; people have areas they've experienced before and things they've never done. Some people are going to work faster than other people on certain tasks - that's life.

HenryBemis• 6 years ago

This is for programming (only). In other areas (GRC/security) the 10x is cumbersome/impossible.

Especially in many mega-big organizations, in non-dev depts, the "Manager" is also tasked to: build and perform analytics, do VERY HEAVY ad-hoc reporting (aka Directors bombarding you with 10 different mini-projects weekly) and at the same time you have to run the projects with 5-10 people, meaning driving the ship, having huddles, handholding, coaching, mentoring, reviewing, be present in 40% of the meetings, etc.

I don't know how much hands-on is a programming 'boss' of 10 people. But if it's no coding at all, I am happy for you and I wish the same for me.

sandermvanvliet• 6 years ago

From experience I’d say it’s near impossible to combine the two roles. Especially if the company is small there is just too much: “we just need to get this done yesterday”, but at this point I guess that’s startup life. Yes you could argue that it’s about priorities and that’s true. However I do find that this only works when you don’t have people sick, on holiday or whatever. The ideal situation just breaks down way too quickly

lumost• 6 years ago

no manager management works ok at a small company without career progression options. But in any shop where there is a standardized performance review you'll need a manager who can represent the team and individuals.

qznc• 6 years ago

It’s not uncommon to find engineering managers with 30 direct reports. Flatt says that’s by design, to prevent micromanaging. “There is only so much you can meddle when you have 30 people on your team, so you have to focus on creating the best environment for engineers to make things happen,” he notes.

Source: How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-man...

Aeolun2• 6 years ago

Ah, it seems we are following the Google way then! I was wondering why my manager had some 100 direct reports. I guess it’s just to prevent meddling.

burlesona3• 6 years ago

That sounds to me like middle management, not front-line technical management. At 30 people you can indeed only focus on the big picture strategy and process, and you really can’t help anyone with their technical issues. If there is no layer of senior technical leadership between that manager and the newer/junior ICs, that would be a disaster.

whirlaway4• 6 years ago

I'm currently a 60% programmer, 40% manager, and can confirm that I am doing a terrible job as both a manager and as a programmer right now. I'm managing four people, three of whom have been hired in the past year. I get lots of complaints about tasks not being clear enough for them and not spending enough time on code review. But I'm also far, far behind on a major project where I have to do the majority of the programming. What I thought would be a simple task I could finish in a month has turned into a death march from all of the interruptions; weekends and holidays like this one are the only time I can get work done.

I figure it's only a matter of time before I'm let go. Five years of equity down the drain, but I've already tried to fix the situation and upper management just doesn't care. The new CTO doesn't know me well enough to care about the past, when times were good.

warent• 6 years ago

This is really sad to hear. I'm curious to know why you have to do the majority of the programming?

toomuchtodo• 6 years ago

Can you not exercise what you’ve vested and move on to a more reasonable org?

higeorge132• 6 years ago

You need to delegate tasks, it's part of your job. Train the new hires, add them to your project and let them do the majority of the work. And you shouldn't work on weekends and holidays.

burlesona3• 6 years ago

First, sorry to hear your story, that stinks.

Second, since you’ve presented this to upper management and they aren’t understanding, I’d take that as a serious signal to look for a new opportunity.

If you do want to stick it out, the best advise I have for you is to 100% drop coding even though you think you can’t. Allow yourself to whiteboard, pair program and review PRs, but don’t allow yourself to be the owner of single programming ticket.

Suddenly you’ll have a lot of time to pour into training, equipping, and leading your team. You’ll probably be surprised how much they improve.

It still might not work out, but given you already know how to be a programmer, taking a shot at 100% managing for a while gives you more opportunity to learn than sticking with the status quo you’re saying doesn’t work.

If you’re really struggling and would like more help, I’ve been doing some coaching lately and I’d be happy to book a chat. My gmail is the same as my HN username :)

bilater• 6 years ago

'Attention is your scarcest resource'

Clicks on link

realYitzi• 6 years ago

underrated comment

koheripbal2• 6 years ago

This is why I designate the period between 8-8:30 to read all the news/socialmedia/etc for the entire day.

You have to time-limit distractions.

gauchojs• 6 years ago

In the morning?

sova2• 6 years ago

"everything is downstream from controlling attention" - Joscha Bach on the Lex AI podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2P3MSZrBM&t=3s

biddit• 6 years ago

That’s an amazing observation. Can you point to roughly where in the video he says this? Thanks!

heed• 6 years ago

It's about here (2:03:40): https://youtu.be/P-2P3MSZrBM?t=7420

sova2• 6 years ago

2:03:00 begins a discussion on meditation and at 2:03:45 he says "everything is downstream from controlling attention" -- toward the end of the segment labeled "AI simulating humans to understand its own nature"

aquajet• 6 years ago

Attention is all you need

JimboOmega5• 6 years ago

(*: For clarity - EM = Engineering Manager, IC = Individual Contributor)

I recently transferred to a team with an explicit intent for me to be an EM on that team. A few months down the road they said I wasn't meeting expectations because of my "time management" which had too many meetings and lacked focus time for IC work - which definitely was not my 50%+ focus. I'm "winning" the resulting political war (my last 1:1 left my lead in tears), but only in the limited sense that I'm not getting fired; it's been a bit of a disaster for everyone.

The unclear expectations of what gets someone an EM role and what is expected of that role is the root of my problem, some of the author's, and a lot of the industry's as a whole.

Leaders are picked from those that are truly focused on tech and truly excel at it... and then told not to do that. How can somebody be "intuitively, emotionally invested in the outcome" of tech work and then suddenly be expected to stop doing it?

I should have been that rare counter-example in that I got picked for this role because of my very visible leadership in other areas. However, when it came time to give me the position formally they fell back on code output and found it somewhat lacking (specifically, the number of commits I made while onboarding was less than those of my established teammates).

There's a school of thought that switching back and forth between IC and EM tracks lets you build a lot of knowledge and be both better manager and IC (the author evidently did). While I do think experience with each helps you do the other, there is a cost to that focus shifting. This isn't like the cost of only being able to code in 45 minute blocks. It's the cost of shifting the things you care most about entirely.

Most managers fail to ever make that shift. Even if they manage to hold themselves back from coding (not all do), their heads remain in the code. One sign is when, in response to impossible expectations from above, they try to come up with technical solutions (e.g., if only we redesigned this module we could meet these impossible deadlines). If your mind is focused on tech, it's the tool you use to solve every problem. Another example is when team members have no idea how to move their careers forward and don't know expectations. A tech focused lead won't be thinking about how a new project is actually the perfect challenge for a more junior employee; their head will be figuring out the best way to solve the task technically.

An EM is not a tech lead. It's not just a different skillset, but a mindset change.

hinkley6• 6 years ago

I’m going to see how far I can get never trying to get promoted above lead developer. Or more to the point, trying not to get promoted above lead developer.

Sounds like some of your coworkers thought an EM role was [a lead developer], which it is not. As a manager, being an IC leads to a bunch of structural problems with the code and therefore the team.

JimboOmega5• 6 years ago

This is another big part of the problem. While at my current company management is a separate track on paper, many still view it as a promotion (including my lead). But if that's not the "promotion" you give them, what is it?

Even if you make it a separate track, it's hard to define what the promotion looks like for more senior engineers, especially at successful companies. When you have $2M of cash in the bank thanks to stock, does a 10% pay bump from senior to staff matter? Does the title bump matter? How can you reward a long-standing successful senior engineer in a way that seems meaningful?

This isn't a question I have an answer to, but "make them a manager" is definitely the wrong one. The majority of my managers have told me how jealous they are that I get to code all day. More than one has told me straight up they do not want to manage. I've watched several teams implode under managers like that.

I think it's completely valid to not want to manage. Hopefully your lead doesn't pressure you to take such a role in the future. But have you thought about what success would look like in your career otherwise?

It is also valid to not be particularly ambitious, to enjoy the craft of software engineering until you retire, and spend the mental energy you would spend on getting promoted on hobbies, family, advocacy, or whatever else brings value to your life... though it can be hard for those of us who are more ambitious to realize that.

hu3• 6 years ago

What's EM and IC?

JimboOmega5• 6 years ago

Engineering Manager / Individual Contributor.

physicles2• 6 years ago

the cost of shifting the things you care most about entirely

Wow, I never heard it articulated that way, but that’s exactly what it is. In 2015, after dodging the EM role for half a decade, my manager left, and there was no one else, so I had to step up. I was below average because I never stopped caring about the code. Luckily for my team, I left the company after eight months.

Now, having been the senior tech person in a startup for the last four years, I feel the fatigue from churning out code (I’ll sketch out a design over a few minutes, and then have to spend days building it), and it’s obvious that the only way to get a better ROI on my time is to lead and/or delegate. For the first time in my career, that feels exciting. I still care too much about tech to be a good manager, but I feel my mindset shifting.

binbag• 6 years ago

Quick, someone post this article to LinkedIn.

50• 6 years ago

From Rebecca Rozelle-Stone's Simone Weil and Theology: "For Weil, attention is the decreative release of self to receive the world in all its reality. Paradoxically, this (passive) letting go of self and accompanying control is simultaneously a “creative” action: attention sees what is invisible (as the good samaritan saw the bleeding, anonymous, dirty man in the ditch) and hears what has been deprived of a voice because the din and smog generated from our maintenance of control has finally cleared."

aliceryhl• 6 years ago

I'm really curious about the tungsten cube it mentions. Anyone who tried one got some experiences to share?

komali2• 6 years ago

https://thume.ca/2019/03/03/my-tungsten-cube/

Looks like it's just a heavy cube to use as a fidgit toy? I wanna play with it now too lol.

Edit: I don't know how to link directly to a single amazon review but holy shit read the one from Richard , it should be the first https://www.amazon.com/Tungsten-Cube-1-5-One-Kilo/dp/B00XZBI...

OakNinja• 6 years ago

It’s the best Amazon review I’ve ever read.

“... I have carried the tungsten with me, have grown attached to the downward pull of its small form, its desire to be one with the floor. This force has become so normal to me that lifting any other object now feels like lifting cotton candy, or a fluffy pillow. ...”

kilroy1232• 6 years ago

Link to the review:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/B00XZBIJLS/RZKKKAM6FE5AI

robocat• 6 years ago

I noticed there is a heavy 4 inch version for $2500:

https://www.amazon.com/Tungsten-Cube-Biggest-Size/dp/B07WK9W...

tomcatfish• 6 years ago

I'll sound like an idiot, but I have one and it's one of the best desktoys I can think of. It's too heavy; it feels alien almost. It's brutalist in a comforting way.

If you have the extra money and you are attracted to the idea of a basic shape with strange properties, I would say you should get it.

kirillzubovsky3• 6 years ago

Opened this in my 64th browser tab.

kilroy1232• 6 years ago

I have ~150 open.

awinter-py• 6 years ago

switch to chromium in ubuntu snap -- crashes at ~ 30

nullsense2• 6 years ago

My brain has too many tabs open.

michaelluang• 6 years ago

So am I.

make3• 6 years ago

I hate that this same joke is made everytime the subject pops up

kirillzubovsky3• 6 years ago

You are paying attention!

hinkley6• 6 years ago

My most plausible scenario for the Singularity now is someone figuring out how to augment short term memory with implants.

I think we are going to find that attention is dominated by working set memory, and people who can juggle even twice as much stuff are going to operate fundamentally differently than those who can’t afford or won’t have the surgery. And past 5x it may become difficult to even communicate, much less compete.

ehnto3• 6 years ago

I think you are right for deep work, but in my opinion it's getting to deep work that is the problem most people face. Having a deep work switch would be life changing.

Once I get into a deep work state, the ability to hold and reason about more of the problem would definitely be helpful.

minitoar• 6 years ago

Imo one of the biggest issues with “deep work” (aside from motivation) is loading everything into short term memory. Maybe if my short term memory was enhanced to be reloadable, or maybe if I had enough short term capacity that I could retain the working set needed for deepness and be interrupted by a coworker for something unrelated.

kanzure3• 6 years ago

Interesting concept. One of my favorite mutations in humans is a single nucleotide flip that confers 19% improvement in working memory capacity. Substantially underrated. Would only work on embryos, of course.

AlexCoventry2• 6 years ago

Which nucleotide site is that?

Metacelsus• 6 years ago

Citation?

notemaker• 6 years ago

This is touched upon in [1]. Great book.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Vernon%20Vinge+A%20Deepness%20in%2...

hinkley6• 6 years ago

Those people were scary. I had blotted them out.

acituan• 6 years ago

I think we are going to find that attention is dominated by working set memory, and people who can juggle even twice as much stuff are going to operate fundamentally differently

I would be careful equivocating working memory, attention and processing power. Attention is much more complicated than what one can juggle in mind actively, what is chosen to enter and leave it also matters, just as the shape and form of the task it conforms to. There is no singular unit in brain that “creates” attention, it is best thought as an emergent property of several, if not all, parts working together.

Besides that, even if we assumed a von Neumann architecture for human cognition, an increase in memory wouldn’t have expanded total processing capacity unless it was starved of it. I don’t think that is the case for humans, if there was a selective advantage to having more working memory as general problem solvers, we would have had it already. Granted, the types of tasks we undertake today can be different in shape, but not completely; still need to survive a physical world, still need to have successful relationships, still have to manage emotions, still have to do all of these while doing our specialized abstract cognitive tasks.

MauranKilom• 6 years ago

Working memory is probably closer to cache than main memory, and it's imo extremely limited and slow to warm up. Imagine a CPU with just 6 cache lines for non-OS code...

Although your argument of "if it brought such an advantage, we should have evolved into it by now" does hold water too. I suppose it hinges on how much of an evolutionary advantage we actually have from excelling in the kind of deep abstract thinking that some jobs require nowadays, vs. how much this improvement would've been worth in past centuries.

ncmncm6• 6 years ago

I can't say whether more short-term memory would make us smarter, but I can say that when I had a short-term memory problem, I could do everything except program.

This dependence on short-term memory is why I find Rust's borrow checker intolerable during exploratory programming. Whatever coding bugs it prevents have to be strongly outnumbered by design errors it causes by stealing attention from the most critical activity at that time.

The borrow checker would deliver 100% of its value if it limited its enforcement to release builds, and just reported numbers otherwise.

glouwbug• 6 years ago

Yes but if the borrow checker is not enforced people _will_ release unsafe code because the borrow checker was optional. It's sort of like how Go enforces same line curlies. It was a decision made to unify the look of the syntax at it's birth, and unfortunately even a curly bracket enforcement is enough of a deterrent as it limits one's expression regarding personal choice. The designers of these languages have an agenda, and by using their tooling we agree to their idea of wisdom. The alternative is something like C. While fun to write, it's a mistake to use unless every programmer onboard is highly skilled with it's pitfalls

dlannoye• 6 years ago

One thing I setup in a large TypeScript project is not having type checking errors block outputting JavaScript. We still require all commits that go through PR to pass type checking and even enforce the compiler's script mode, but locally we try to ensure the developers can iterate on an idea as fast as they want and refine later. This system has been well received by all of the developers working on the project.

WhompingWindows• 6 years ago

We already have a computer-brain interface: it's our fingers constantly touching our "phones".

With such advanced devices hand-held already, why would we even need to interface with the human mind? If we're at the point of human-computer interface, which is probably 100+ years away, we will already be beholden to 100 more years of innovation in mobile devices, which is hyper-charged by capitalism already.

Think back to 2000: Very few people could have imagined the vast implications of these simple hand-held devices. It's much easier to make a hand-held, rectangular, "multi-tool" computer, based on existing tech, than creating a new class of technology to interface with neurons and store biological data.

Now, these simple "phones" have destroyed entire industries, created entirely new ones, allowed the scaling up of all kinds of mis and disinformation, and allowed the capture of human attention on a massive scale.

How many people in the rich world do not have a phone? How many poor people are trying to get one? How many times per day do people check their phone? How long do they use it?

We have all enrolled in a massive psychological experiment, something evolution or society as we built it never had to contend with. The "singularity" is coming and our devices are opening the door to it day by day.

koheripbal2• 6 years ago

This is a great point, and I think it highlights the fact that there is no good software to push/pop/schedule short-term memory items, and organize them into a simple priority scheme.

I think part of the problem is that almost all software is designed to be usable without training/learning, so almost all task management tools get reduced to lists - which are inefficient.

We need a tool that retrains our brains to generate units of work that, aside from a line of descriptive text, also contain: NPV, value-over-time, hierarchical dependencies, resource allocation, location dependence, etc... ...and then have a simple piece of software prioritize based on calculated optimized order of action.

asimovfan• 6 years ago

What is mindfulness (smrti)? It is non-forgetting by the mind (cetas) with regard to the object experienced. Its function is non-distraction.

- Asanga, from Abhidharmasamuccaya

chrisweekly• 6 years ago

cool blog; author Ben Kuhn founded the Harvard Effective Altruism group, and wrote an amusing bit about "giving games"... etc

ineedasername• 6 years ago

I'd say it's time, not attention that is most scarce, but they are highly correlated so I suppose attention is a reasonable proxy for time.

hooch• 6 years ago

Time cannot be controlled. Attention, however?

unsatchmo• 6 years ago

50% of your time and energy seems like an impossible bar. At 16 waking hours, we are talking about 8 hours spent entirely on focusing on some task. That’s like the hyper optimistic assumptions of time spent that lead to bad estimates in software. I would say even the 10x engineers I met only focused for 5-6 hours a day max, so 30% focus.

elxavit0• 6 years ago

a key insight for me in this article is this one: "In order for bullshit not to distract me for the rest of the week, I try to minimize my number of “open loops”—projects or processes that I’ve started but not completed."

I hadn't realized that I probably keep way too many "open-loops" in my life. And they are draining away my attention-currency.

noneeeed• 6 years ago

I have this problem. What I've found is that even if I am not actually doing a task, the simple fact that it exists and I've not done it niggles in the back of my brain and stresses me out.

Last night I finally cleared off all my emails and did all the little task that have been sitting around. It feels so good to not have them lingering on the edge of my brain.

physicles2• 6 years ago

Another way to hack around this is to use notes. Before I leave for the day, and especially for the weekend, I write 4-5 sentences about what I want to work on next. Makes it easy to put things down after work and easy to pick them up again. Also, I think it was GTD that said part of the point of having a next actions list is that it’s on paper and not in your brain.

greggman33• 6 years ago

I know this isn't the directly the topic of the article but the title "attention is your scarcest resource" reminds me that I wish there was some pledge/badge of "we will not intentionally distract you and provide options to reduce distractions" pledge for apps and websites.

It drives me nuts for example that discourse has "achievements" to distract you. Every discourse forum I join for customer service is yet another 15 distracting achievements begging for my attention. It's not that I care about the achievements, it's that it's the same notification system that I got a new message so I'm compelled to go see if the highlight is a new message and when it turns out it's not, it's a dumb achievement badge then my time has been wasted and my mind has been distracted.

Multiply this by 50 apps to 100 apps/sites etc and it's clear that features as such that can't be turned off are irresponsible toward and disrespectful of users. That idea that you're a bad person if you design and create such distractions needs to spread.

mjrbrennan3• 6 years ago

I work at Discourse; there is new functionality coming in the 2.6 release to address this issue, see https://meta.discourse.org/t/let-experienced-users-skip-new-.... When you join a new community you will be able to click an option that skips all of the Discobot tutorial and the new user badge notifications (which are the basic ones like First Like).

greggman33• 6 years ago

This is great! Can I opt out of all badges or only "basic ones".

Of course it will be a decade before everyone updates to a version that supports this option and allows the user to enable it. In the meantime we'll have our time and attention wasted for years (T_T)

There's another, automatically getting spammed with emails and then having to manually opt-out. I get you want it to be frictionless but when signing up a opt-in checkbox for email would respect my time and scarce attention than opting me into daily emails and forced me to later opt-out.

And sorry to pick on Discourse. There's tons of other offenders but Discourse is one most people on HN have experience with. Steam/Xbox/Playstation all have the same issue. Wasted time and attention required for things I don't care about. The worst is the OS popping up achievement notifications right over the climax of some scene. That others care is fine. Just let me turn them off because "Attention is your scarcest resource".

esperent• 6 years ago

This is enabled by default, but it can be disabled by site admins. On the three.js discourse, for example, we disabled this "feature" pretty soon after creating the forum.

rorykoehler• 6 years ago

Same for marketing emails sent from addresses used for critical alerts.

rainforest• 6 years ago

Slack does this too. Slackbot sends you "getting started" tips by default, which led to me receiving an email to ensure I enable notifications. That email was sent out of office hours on a Friday evening too. I'm sure it wasn't intentional but it made it look like an insidious attempt to cram itself as deeply into my attention span as possible.

mbar84• 6 years ago

One way to deal with this is to use the element picker mode of uBlock Origin. Often it's not too much of a hassle to just zap the bell icon and be done with it.

reportgunner• 6 years ago

You could also enable uBO's 'I am an advanced user' mode in the settings and block all images on the website.

I've been doing that for youtube to block video thumbnails and it works really well for me.

geewee• 6 years ago

I think this is a nice article. Particularly the thing about "only working on one thing" - I often see teams having to juggle ten different projects at once due to management. This just means that you do none of them particularly well.

marvion• 6 years ago

In the short term, this made me less efficient, because I’d spend less time programming and more time staring vacantly at the ceiling.
As a manager, it became impossible to “only work on one thing:” there were too many small tasks and too many projects going on in parallel.

As someone with ADHD, thank you for that reminder.

It is an obvious issue that is hard to be aware of.

Attention is your scarcest resource

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