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Attention is your scarcest resource
- andrejserafim 6y agoI 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 6y agoI 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.
- ehnto 6y agoLikewise, 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 6y agoThat's a key lesson of Getting Things Done. Pick three tasks.
- graeme 6y agoHe 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.
- elliekelly 6y agoIt’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/ https://www.focusmate.com/
- Insanity 6y agoDoes anyone else have experience to me? It sounds odd to me but might work.
- eloff 6y agoI 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.
- baby 6y agoI 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?"
- eloff 6y agoYeah, that's a good one. I need constant internet access for my work though (software engineer) for slack, for testing, for docs, so it wouldn't work for me. Anything that introduces enough friction that you stop and make a conscious decision will do the job.
- einpoklum 6y agoAh, 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 6y agoWhat is it about HN that makes it feel much more productive than other similar sites?
- hinkley 6y agoLower troll ratio perhaps?
- einpoklum 6y agoPerhaps: More intelligent and engaging trolls? :-)
- inetsee 6y agoThe 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".
- nullsense 6y agoI found a silver bullet here once. Read an article about The DAO and smart contracts. Led to making 100k. You're so right though. It is the allure of potentially finding a silver bullet. Combined with the great community and thoughtful discussions.
- kempbellt 6y agoAn 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 6y agothe 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 6y agoTime 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.
- sova 6y ago"everything is downstream from controlling attention" - Joscha Bach on the Lex AI podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2P3MSZrBM&t=3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2P3MSZrBM&t=3s
- biddit 6y agoThat’s an amazing observation. Can you point to roughly where in the video he says this? Thanks!
- heed 6y agoIt's about here (2:03:40): https://youtu.be/P-2P3MSZrBM?t=7420 https://youtu.be/P-2P3MSZrBM?t=7420
- sova 6y ago2:03:00 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"
- hh3k0 6y 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.
- ehnto 6y agoI 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- burlesona 6y agoI 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.
- justicezyx 6y agoAgree 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 6y agoY’all might not be machines but you’re definitely cogs.
- justicezyx 6y agoI dont think human are cogs, at least not swes, they are more like little electronic controller...
- cheschire 6y agoAnd a sigmoid function isn't a boolean switch but you still get more or less the same result regardless of how complex the definition is. Ultimately employees move the company machine, whether their job is to code, sell, manage, or clean toilets.
- bilater 6y ago'Attention is your scarcest resource' Clicks on link
- realYitzi 6y agounderrated comment
- koheripbal 6y agoThis 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 6y agoIn the morning?
- aquajet 6y agoAttention is all you need
- JimboOmega 6y 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.
- hinkley 6y agoI’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.
- binbag 6y agoQuick, someone post this article to LinkedIn.
- 50 6y agoFrom 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 6y agoI'm really curious about the tungsten cube it mentions. Anyone who tried one got some experiences to share?
- komali2 6y agohttps://thume.ca/2019/03/03/my-tungsten-cube/ 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/B00XZBIJLS/ https://www.amazon.com/Tungsten-Cube-1-5-One-Kilo/dp/B00XZBI...
- OakNinja 6y agoIt’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. ...”
- kilroy123 6y agoLink to the review: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/B00XZBIJLS/RZKKKAM6FE5AI https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/B00XZBIJLS/RZKKKAM6FE5AI
- robocat 6y agoI noticed there is a heavy 4 inch version for $2500: https://www.amazon.com/Tungsten-Cube-Biggest-Size/dp/B07WK9WLZ8 https://www.amazon.com/Tungsten-Cube-Biggest-Size/dp/B07WK9W...
- tomcatfish 6y agoI'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.
- kirillzubovsky 6y agoOpened this in my 64th browser tab.
- kilroy123 6y agoI have ~150 open.
- awinter-py 6y agoswitch to chromium in ubuntu snap -- crashes at ~ 30
- nullsense 6y agoMy brain has too many tabs open.
- maitredusoi 6y agoI have 500 opened(and some never closed since 2 years ...)
- michaelluang 6y agoSo am I.
- make3 6y agoI hate that this same joke is made everytime the subject pops up
- kirillzubovsky 6y agoYou are paying attention!
- imhoguy 6y agoI want my AttentionCoin™ back.
- 6y ago
- hinkley 6y agoMy 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.
- ehnto 6y agoI 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 6y agoImo 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.
- hinkley 6y agoAnd not letting someone who wants to know if you are going to the meeting later upset the entire house of cards.
- kanzure 6y agoInteresting 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.
- AlexCoventry 6y agoWhich nucleotide site is that?
- asimovfan 6y agoWhat 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
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- chrisweekly 6y agocool blog; author Ben Kuhn founded the Harvard Effective Altruism group, and wrote an amusing bit about "giving games"... etc
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ineedasername 6y agoI'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 6y agoTime cannot be controlled. Attention, however?
- unsatchmo 6y ago50% 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 6y agoa 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 6y agoI 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.
- physicles 6y agoAnother 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.
- greggman3 6y agoI 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.
- mjrbrennan 6y agoI 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-to-discourse-features/63137/37 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).
- greggman3 6y agoThis 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".
- geewee 6y agoI 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 6y 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.