It's getting harder to focus every day | Glyphack
I’m feeling it right now. I had to set a timer for 15 minute on my computer and block all distractions to write this.<br>If I didn’t force myself to focus I would easily get distracted by something after few minutes.<br>Even when I’m doing things that I’ve been waiting to do it, I still feel the urge to do something else.
I don’t know how and when this happened.<br>During the last few years I was always studying, working, and doing open source.<br>And actually got stuff done.<br>Doing all of those at the same time requires paying attention to what I wanted to do and ignore the noise.
Nowadays I’m lucky if I get 1 hour of focused time.<br>Just to be clear, my goal is not to work 90 hours a week or anything crazy.<br>That is not possible for me.<br>I just want the hour I spend programming, learning, or writing to be just one activity.<br>But instead I spend 10 minute on something then I get distracted, and try to focus again.
Ideally, I want to be able to plan to work on something for long hours without any distraction.<br>After that time get back online check for messages and other things.
The distractions are not one particular thing. A few examples:
I want to do something and I remember there’s a post related to this. I go to find it and in between I click on some links and end up reading something completely unrelated.
I am waiting for something then I go browse the web and I get distracted.
I’m working on something and I face a challenge I have to think for 10 minutes. I get up to get some water and check my phone along the way and get distracted. Sometimes I get distracted by making the bed.
It feels like my brain finds a way to do something else and avoid painful situations like boredom or hard work.
It reminds me of when I was in high school talking to a friend about how laying in bed with your phone can kill hours without you noticing it.<br>It was circa 2015, back then attention hungry apps were less powerful but still lure a teenager’s mind for few hours.<br>I learned that these apps should be used very carefully.<br>At that time I made a decision to never have a charger near my bed.<br>Back then it was mostly about my phone, because when I was on the computer I was either reading, or programming, or playing a game.<br>Even if I wasn’t in the mood to think, I played a strategic game or chess.<br>These activities exercise the mind and are fun.<br>All of them were an intentional activity.<br>I didn’t do any passive activities like browsing or chatting on my computer.
Later I discovered HackerNoon and Medium, it was the first website that I was browsing whenever I was bored behind the computer.<br>This meant that I had a way to get out boredom easily.<br>It used to have some high quality content. It inspired me to do some projects and learn more programming.<br>I found channels like CSDojo there.<br>Nowadays I don’t even open them.<br>They are filled with slop or click bait articles, probably because of monetization incentives.<br>Then hackernews, and YouTube and others took their place.<br>I also found some good people and blogs along the way.<br>I learned to keep a reading list from people I like to read when I’m on the bus.
I slowly found more activities for when I’m bored.<br>This made it harder to focus on hard things for me.<br>What kept me on track was that there was no way out.<br>I had to work out some algebra problems. I kept myself to a very high bar of understanding what I do.<br>And I did everything in LaTeX so I couldn’t copy from someone else. I was the only one typing them.
The first time I saw people not putting the effort and still get the reward for it was at work.<br>You might wonder, aren’t people in the university constantly cheating and copying homework, and get good grades?<br>Well yes, but when you talked with someone in that group it was clear that he is clueless about the subject.<br>A good grade didn’t mean much to me at that time. And as a student cheating does not get you that far.
At work it is different.<br>My days are mostly spend meetings and over chat.<br>The balance between actual work and bullshit is skewed.<br>I saw people who were barely doing any work and just talk are successful.<br>As long as people give 10% of their attention to work they are considered fine in most environments.<br>Previously I did an experiment to track my time and found out that I spent 8 hours chatting on slack in a week.
I don’t care how employers want to shatter employee’s focus.<br>But this made me get used to distractions when I’m programming.<br>I’m trying to undo this damage.
The next big change is more usage of LLMs.<br>I find myself in this situation too many times, where I outsource something to an LLM and then I start working on something else.<br>And while doing this I keep thinking about what it’s doing.<br>Or when I’m thinking about something I start chatting with an LLM about my idea and instead of...