16 ms·

How I Spend My Attention

256 points by kenta_nagamine 6y ago

ianai 6y ago
Good read for a Sunday night! Definitely important to pay attention to and be gentle with the things we think - particularly towards ourselves but also as an affect. I
carlivar 6y ago
And it didn't even mention parenting. Kids are the most sensitive to this "attention budget". Invest wisely.
- pelario 6y ago
  Can you elaborate more?
  - DoingIsLearning 6y ago
    Not GP but focusing heavily on things that request your immediate attention but are not necessarily what you want for your life can be a huge physical time sink, I really like that essay on 'life is short' from Paul Graham: "You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times."
  - Loughla 6y ago
    The amount of time you spend in focused attention with your child is directly related to your child's experience of being a child, as well as their overall development, and your memories of them as a child. Like the other poster said - there are only so many Christmases that are magic. But to take it further - there are only a finite number of developmental milestones, and your time and energy and attention absolutely have an impact on those milestones (barring a disability or something like that). For example - our oldest started speaking in (hilariously speech impedimented) full sentences at 12 months. People wondered if he was a genius baby. No, he's pretty average in terms of raw computing power. We spent an ENORMOUS amount of time with him as a baby, just talking. We narrated everything we did. We spoke to him as a human person, instead of babbling back at him like a lot of people do. We described the steps of everything we did. We explained the reasons for what we were doing as we were doing it. That focused, invested time had a clear, and definite impact on the child's development. And that's not even talking about the benefit for our mental health when engaging in a substantive manner with that tiny weirdo.
shadowmore 6y ago
Bit of a meta question: is linking to Substack posts in this way equally as viable as linking to a standalone blog? As in, the advantages of Substack are clear, but are there any distinct disadvantages to using it as both a blog (exposure, discoverability) and a newsletter (reader retention) at the same time? Anything about it that limits it in ways in which a standalone blog wouldn't be limited, e.g. analytics?
- trevyn 6y ago
  Using somebody else’s domain name as your incoming links and branding is obviously setting yourself up for future pain.
  - tiborsaas 6y ago
    You can use your own domain with Substack, but it costs $50 to do so.
    - alecvo 6y ago
      You can find this here http://forum.ppr.pl/viewtopic.php?p=1151297 http://forum.ppr.pl/viewtopic.php?p=1151297
- war1025 6y ago
  What exactly is Substack? I asked a few weeks ago if it was the new Medium, and that was apparently the wrong way to ask the question because it got downvoted through the floor.
  - whichdan 6y ago
    It's a newsletter/blog platform that has an easily-dismissable splash screen prompting you to subscribe before you see any posts.
    - nullsense 6y ago
      So it's the new Medium.
war1025 6y ago
Biggest quality of life benefit I've given myself in the past two months: Turn off the news. If something is actually important, you'll hear about it anyway. And if you don't hear about it, it wasn't actually as important as the reporters made it out to be. Plus in all likelihood the events being reported on are thousands of miles away from you and have zero impact on your daily life. Obviously this pairs well with cutting out all the nonsense on your social media feeds.
- trevyn 6y ago
  I highly recommend turning off all audible/vibrational alerts on your devices, allowing exceptions for channels that are only used for true emergencies. After that, try not using your phone at all for 24 hours, laptops/desktops still allowed.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  Reddit honestly killed news for me because of the trump presidency. For years I thought he'd be removed from office. Turns out redditors blew unbelievably small things out of proportion to the point that many including myself just ignored it cause it would change anything. Getting off reddit has been one of the best things in my life. Discord has helped find more positive outlets for me to waste my time. But lastly, get a hobby that isn't just working on getting better at something. It's cool if you can do like 30 different things, but that's hard. Know your limits and budget screw around time to help unwind.
  - mrlala 6y ago
    Well, I think the bigger problem is the actual general insanity of the last 4 years, mixed in with growing social media. It's horrible for people to have to be bombarded by trolling and lies by the president on a daily basis. (To those who wish to deny that, please don't bother because you are wrong, it's not a debate). >For years I thought he'd be removed from office. Turns out redditors blew unbelievably small things out of proportion Eh yes and no.. any other president before trump would have resigned in disgrace about 100 times. I don't think it's blowing things out of proportion when the PRESIDENT is constantly calling people names on twitter on a daily basis and doing his best to divide. Anyway.. I agree the best solution is to try and avoid seeing shit daily, and I'm really really hoping in two months we can go back to not hearing about politics every fucking day unless we really want to seek it out.
dukeofdoom 6y ago
I've been shooting short clips from interesting moments of my day. I've accumulated enough that I can go back to previous year and see what I was doing that day. I rollerblade a lot, so I have a large amount of these clips. And overall, I seem to do a lot of the same things over and over. I don't know if thats good or bad, but these clips definitely point out the patterns in my life. The interesting part I found looking them over is the day by day change of seasons. I now have a record of when the leaves fell off the trees, and when the first snow fell in my region. So I'm more aware when these changes will happen this year. I also seem to be fixing things a lot. So it made me more conscious of buying so many things, that will just break. Birthdays, and family dinners stand out as happy moments.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nicbou 6y ago
  I'm building something around this general idea. I found that my photo timeline gives me a good idea of what's going on in my life. I'm now extending that timeline with geolocation history, social media posts, calendar events, expenses etc. I'm curious to see what sorts of patterns will crop up.
  - Reelin 6y ago
    > geolocation history I realize the pandemic is temporary but I was amused at the thought of just how useless that feature would be for me at present. That would be a really neat tool though - I hope it makes an appearance on HN once you get it working.
    - nielsole 6y ago
      I had my own geotracker running pre-pandemic and it is very nice. When you run this long enough you get very nice heatmaps out of it. (Can't share mine for obvious privacy reasons) They are something very personal, almost worthy putting on the wall ;)
    - 6y ago
davidvaughan 6y ago
Csikszentmihalyi says that attention "is an energy under our control, to do with as we please". If only it were true that we have attention under our control. There are so many things we can pay attention to, and so many people whose job it is to distract us, that we can rarely direct it as we want. And biologically, we're set up to be distracted by threats and unexpected phenomena. That's not to say we don't pay attention. As he points out elsewhere, Csikszentmihalyi identified 'flow', which is when we get into a nice state of focus on something positive. Luckily, we're finding out more about how to pay attention to things we want to pay attention to. Prioritising, dividing tasks into chunks, getting enough sleep, choosing what we attend to more wisely are all helpful.
bradknowles 6y ago
Remember: Your focus determines your reality. — Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
lokethien 6y ago
Good read. It's easy to waste ones attention so gotta be careful.
kuu 6y ago
> Everyone hates the feeling of having wasted their time doing nothing. My 2020 in one sentence.
- tremon 6y ago
  Not me. All that time freed by not-commuting and all those ten minutes spent de-focusing from work have been very productive for me: I've been able to fix things around the house, clearing a 3-year backlog in just six months. I'm now at a point where I can realistically start planning for the future again, instead of feeling weighed down by things that should have been finished already.
  - kuu 6y ago
    Lucky you. I was just exaggerating a bit with the sentence for making a joke, but I'm sure this is not my most productive year.
    - wccrawford 6y ago
      I don't know how it would compare to a year without Covid, but I've gotten a lot of stuff done at home, including setting up a laser engraver/cutter and quite a few hobby projects. I was on this path already (I already had an MPCNC and woodworking tools) but I'm pretty sure this year gave me a lot more time to play around with stuff, and so I got further.
Brajeshwar 6y ago
We stopped news and newspapers around 2010-2011. Neighbors, friends, and relatives are surprised when we have no newspapers at home (Newspapers are still an in-thing in India). My wife started subscribing to Newspaper now just so she can wrap her wet-garbage in it. I’m still looking for a bio-degradable solution to store wet-garbage for at-least 24-hours. I stopped all unscheduled phone calls except from a “!DND” group for the past many years and I love it. In-fact, when iOS 14 changed the interface for phone calls, I was dumb-founded few times before I realize the tiny notification like thing on the top is the phone reject/accept interface. Anyone can lead a distraction free phone life[1]. I disabled almost all forms of notifications a while back and I’m super happy with that decision. My default when adding any new App/Program to my toolset is to start by turning off notifications[2]. 1. https://no.phone.wtf https://no.phone.wtf 2. https://brajeshwar.com/2014/missing-step-productivity-activities-stop-notifications/ https://brajeshwar.com/2014/missing-step-productivity-activi...
- AndrewDavis 6y ago
  I do something similar with my phone. Android phone set to "do not disturb" permanently. The only exceptions calls/texts from starred contacts which include only my immediately family, work when I'm on call (and only then), and I'll temporarily add a starred contact if I'm expecting a call (eg I've called a tradesperson leaving a message and expect a call back). And even my immediate family talk to me primarily via chat apps that aren't covered via starred contacts. Therefore I know when my phone makes a sound it is something I need to respond to in a timely manner. Everything else causes a notifications pulse, with different colours for different apps (purple for a chat app, yellow for work email etc). It's so unobtrusive I don't notice it unless I deliberately look at it.
- christophilus 6y ago
  I did the same. I also moved from Slack to Basecamp, which has been a marked improvement.
  - Brajeshwar 6y ago
    Many people do not realize the beauty and power of Async communications, especially while working remotely. It takes time, effort, and practice but pays back way better in future. We are also on the Basecamp camp.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
altStoner 6y ago
>Everything has to be a choice, or else it’s a form of addiction. I always want to 'choose' to use my phone because otherwise, it might be equivalent to doing nothing. This is so true. "Using" instead of "choosing" to use your phone and scrolling endlessly is simply being on autopilot mode. I have all the notifications blocked that saves me a great deal of time. In this age of political drama, if we choose to spend our time in a more practical way rather than bashing everyone on social media without following that pyramid of "how to debate online" (iirc), there'd be a lot of essential time saved on our sides.
aclissold 6y ago
And the more you practice directing your attention, the better your skills of awareness become! You can choose positivity over negativity, joy over anger, love over hate.
- ben_ 6y ago
  This is one of the greatest benefits I've developed from mindfulness practice
ben_ 6y ago
This interestingly is similar to having a mindfulness practice, making sure to set your intention to be aware of things in and around yourself, rather than autopilot
loughnane 6y ago
One of the best things I’ve done recently has been using huggin. In terms of news I have a bunch of RSS feeds for my industry and use huginn to do two things: 1. Filter them, to increase signal:noise 2. Set a schedule so that I get a “morning briefing” with industry news. This way I’m not inundated throughout the day. I do the same thing with hn and other personally interesting sources, but have those delivered Friday afternoon I still skim hn (why I’m here now) but mostly looking to see if there is anything I want to comment on. If I see a neat headline I know I can read the details later. I also read the economist (a weekly) and listen to and read books to stay more generally aware of the world Getting away from a continuous feed has been really great
XCSme 6y ago
This article feels all over the place. It starts with the premise of teaching you how to be productive, then says that you are what you do, then goes to talk about how and why to be nice, then several ending notes describing mindfulness. It also says doing a something without being mindful is the same as doing nothing. The conclusion is: > What you pay attention to is going to be your life. It's so basic that it hits me. But at the same time, there are tons of book that promote automation, see Atomic Habits, which makes it clear that good (automated) habits make your life easier and more productive. So if you spend 50% of your day, doing automated tasks (going to the gym, learning to play the piano, showering, watering the plants, cleaning up your room, etc.) does this mean that you did nothing the entire time? Also, you can both do an automate task and pay attention to it (be mindful) or think of something else (plan things, dream about stuff, get new ideas, etc.).

Good read for a Sunday night! Definitely important to pay attention to and be gentle with the things we think - particularly towards ourselves but also as an affect. I

carlivar 6y ago

And it didn't even mention parenting. Kids are the most sensitive to this "attention budget". Invest wisely.

pelario 6y ago
Can you elaborate more?
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  Not GP but focusing heavily on things that request your immediate attention but are not necessarily what you want for your life can be a huge physical time sink, I really like that essay on 'life is short' from Paul Graham: "You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times."
- Loughla 6y ago
  The amount of time you spend in focused attention with your child is directly related to your child's experience of being a child, as well as their overall development, and your memories of them as a child. Like the other poster said - there are only so many Christmases that are magic. But to take it further - there are only a finite number of developmental milestones, and your time and energy and attention absolutely have an impact on those milestones (barring a disability or something like that). For example - our oldest started speaking in (hilariously speech impedimented) full sentences at 12 months. People wondered if he was a genius baby. No, he's pretty average in terms of raw computing power. We spent an ENORMOUS amount of time with him as a baby, just talking. We narrated everything we did. We spoke to him as a human person, instead of babbling back at him like a lot of people do. We described the steps of everything we did. We explained the reasons for what we were doing as we were doing it. That focused, invested time had a clear, and definite impact on the child's development. And that's not even talking about the benefit for our mental health when engaging in a substantive manner with that tiny weirdo.

shadowmore 6y ago

Bit of a meta question: is linking to Substack posts in this way equally as viable as linking to a standalone blog? As in, the advantages of Substack are clear, but are there any distinct disadvantages to using it as both a blog (exposure, discoverability) and a newsletter (reader retention) at the same time? Anything about it that limits it in ways in which a standalone blog wouldn't be limited, e.g. analytics?

trevyn 6y ago
Using somebody else’s domain name as your incoming links and branding is obviously setting yourself up for future pain.
- tiborsaas 6y ago
  You can use your own domain with Substack, but it costs $50 to do so.
  - alecvo 6y ago
    You can find this here http://forum.ppr.pl/viewtopic.php?p=1151297 http://forum.ppr.pl/viewtopic.php?p=1151297
war1025 6y ago
What exactly is Substack? I asked a few weeks ago if it was the new Medium, and that was apparently the wrong way to ask the question because it got downvoted through the floor.
- whichdan 6y ago
  It's a newsletter/blog platform that has an easily-dismissable splash screen prompting you to subscribe before you see any posts.
  - nullsense 6y ago
    So it's the new Medium.

war1025 6y ago

Biggest quality of life benefit I've given myself in the past two months: Turn off the news. If something is actually important, you'll hear about it anyway. And if you don't hear about it, it wasn't actually as important as the reporters made it out to be. Plus in all likelihood the events being reported on are thousands of miles away from you and have zero impact on your daily life. Obviously this pairs well with cutting out all the nonsense on your social media feeds.

trevyn 6y ago
I highly recommend turning off all audible/vibrational alerts on your devices, allowing exceptions for channels that are only used for true emergencies. After that, try not using your phone at all for 24 hours, laptops/desktops still allowed.
MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
Reddit honestly killed news for me because of the trump presidency. For years I thought he'd be removed from office. Turns out redditors blew unbelievably small things out of proportion to the point that many including myself just ignored it cause it would change anything. Getting off reddit has been one of the best things in my life. Discord has helped find more positive outlets for me to waste my time. But lastly, get a hobby that isn't just working on getting better at something. It's cool if you can do like 30 different things, but that's hard. Know your limits and budget screw around time to help unwind.
- mrlala 6y ago
  Well, I think the bigger problem is the actual general insanity of the last 4 years, mixed in with growing social media. It's horrible for people to have to be bombarded by trolling and lies by the president on a daily basis. (To those who wish to deny that, please don't bother because you are wrong, it's not a debate). >For years I thought he'd be removed from office. Turns out redditors blew unbelievably small things out of proportion Eh yes and no.. any other president before trump would have resigned in disgrace about 100 times. I don't think it's blowing things out of proportion when the PRESIDENT is constantly calling people names on twitter on a daily basis and doing his best to divide. Anyway.. I agree the best solution is to try and avoid seeing shit daily, and I'm really really hoping in two months we can go back to not hearing about politics every fucking day unless we really want to seek it out.

dukeofdoom 6y ago

I've been shooting short clips from interesting moments of my day. I've accumulated enough that I can go back to previous year and see what I was doing that day. I rollerblade a lot, so I have a large amount of these clips. And overall, I seem to do a lot of the same things over and over. I don't know if thats good or bad, but these clips definitely point out the patterns in my life. The interesting part I found looking them over is the day by day change of seasons. I now have a record of when the leaves fell off the trees, and when the first snow fell in my region. So I'm more aware when these changes will happen this year. I also seem to be fixing things a lot. So it made me more conscious of buying so many things, that will just break. Birthdays, and family dinners stand out as happy moments.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nicbou 6y ago
I'm building something around this general idea. I found that my photo timeline gives me a good idea of what's going on in my life. I'm now extending that timeline with geolocation history, social media posts, calendar events, expenses etc. I'm curious to see what sorts of patterns will crop up.
- Reelin 6y ago
  > geolocation history I realize the pandemic is temporary but I was amused at the thought of just how useless that feature would be for me at present. That would be a really neat tool though - I hope it makes an appearance on HN once you get it working.
  - nielsole 6y ago
    I had my own geotracker running pre-pandemic and it is very nice. When you run this long enough you get very nice heatmaps out of it. (Can't share mine for obvious privacy reasons) They are something very personal, almost worthy putting on the wall ;)
  - 6y ago

davidvaughan 6y ago

Csikszentmihalyi says that attention "is an energy under our control, to do with as we please". If only it were true that we have attention under our control. There are so many things we can pay attention to, and so many people whose job it is to distract us, that we can rarely direct it as we want. And biologically, we're set up to be distracted by threats and unexpected phenomena. That's not to say we don't pay attention. As he points out elsewhere, Csikszentmihalyi identified 'flow', which is when we get into a nice state of focus on something positive. Luckily, we're finding out more about how to pay attention to things we want to pay attention to. Prioritising, dividing tasks into chunks, getting enough sleep, choosing what we attend to more wisely are all helpful.

bradknowles 6y ago

Remember: Your focus determines your reality. — Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

lokethien 6y ago

Good read. It's easy to waste ones attention so gotta be careful.

kuu 6y ago

> Everyone hates the feeling of having wasted their time doing nothing. My 2020 in one sentence.

tremon 6y ago
Not me. All that time freed by not-commuting and all those ten minutes spent de-focusing from work have been very productive for me: I've been able to fix things around the house, clearing a 3-year backlog in just six months. I'm now at a point where I can realistically start planning for the future again, instead of feeling weighed down by things that should have been finished already.
- kuu 6y ago
  Lucky you. I was just exaggerating a bit with the sentence for making a joke, but I'm sure this is not my most productive year.
  - wccrawford 6y ago
    I don't know how it would compare to a year without Covid, but I've gotten a lot of stuff done at home, including setting up a laser engraver/cutter and quite a few hobby projects. I was on this path already (I already had an MPCNC and woodworking tools) but I'm pretty sure this year gave me a lot more time to play around with stuff, and so I got further.

Brajeshwar 6y ago

We stopped news and newspapers around 2010-2011. Neighbors, friends, and relatives are surprised when we have no newspapers at home (Newspapers are still an in-thing in India). My wife started subscribing to Newspaper now just so she can wrap her wet-garbage in it. I’m still looking for a bio-degradable solution to store wet-garbage for at-least 24-hours. I stopped all unscheduled phone calls except from a “!DND” group for the past many years and I love it. In-fact, when iOS 14 changed the interface for phone calls, I was dumb-founded few times before I realize the tiny notification like thing on the top is the phone reject/accept interface. Anyone can lead a distraction free phone life[1]. I disabled almost all forms of notifications a while back and I’m super happy with that decision. My default when adding any new App/Program to my toolset is to start by turning off notifications[2]. 1. https://no.phone.wtf https://no.phone.wtf 2. https://brajeshwar.com/2014/missing-step-productivity-activities-stop-notifications/ https://brajeshwar.com/2014/missing-step-productivity-activi...

AndrewDavis 6y ago
I do something similar with my phone. Android phone set to "do not disturb" permanently. The only exceptions calls/texts from starred contacts which include only my immediately family, work when I'm on call (and only then), and I'll temporarily add a starred contact if I'm expecting a call (eg I've called a tradesperson leaving a message and expect a call back). And even my immediate family talk to me primarily via chat apps that aren't covered via starred contacts. Therefore I know when my phone makes a sound it is something I need to respond to in a timely manner. Everything else causes a notifications pulse, with different colours for different apps (purple for a chat app, yellow for work email etc). It's so unobtrusive I don't notice it unless I deliberately look at it.
christophilus 6y ago
I did the same. I also moved from Slack to Basecamp, which has been a marked improvement.
- Brajeshwar 6y ago
  Many people do not realize the beauty and power of Async communications, especially while working remotely. It takes time, effort, and practice but pays back way better in future. We are also on the Basecamp camp.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

altStoner 6y ago

>Everything has to be a choice, or else it’s a form of addiction. I always want to 'choose' to use my phone because otherwise, it might be equivalent to doing nothing. This is so true. "Using" instead of "choosing" to use your phone and scrolling endlessly is simply being on autopilot mode. I have all the notifications blocked that saves me a great deal of time. In this age of political drama, if we choose to spend our time in a more practical way rather than bashing everyone on social media without following that pyramid of "how to debate online" (iirc), there'd be a lot of essential time saved on our sides.

aclissold 6y ago

And the more you practice directing your attention, the better your skills of awareness become! You can choose positivity over negativity, joy over anger, love over hate.

ben_ 6y ago
This is one of the greatest benefits I've developed from mindfulness practice

ben_ 6y ago

This interestingly is similar to having a mindfulness practice, making sure to set your intention to be aware of things in and around yourself, rather than autopilot

loughnane 6y ago

One of the best things I’ve done recently has been using huggin. In terms of news I have a bunch of RSS feeds for my industry and use huginn to do two things: 1. Filter them, to increase signal:noise 2. Set a schedule so that I get a “morning briefing” with industry news. This way I’m not inundated throughout the day. I do the same thing with hn and other personally interesting sources, but have those delivered Friday afternoon I still skim hn (why I’m here now) but mostly looking to see if there is anything I want to comment on. If I see a neat headline I know I can read the details later. I also read the economist (a weekly) and listen to and read books to stay more generally aware of the world Getting away from a continuous feed has been really great

XCSme 6y ago

This article feels all over the place. It starts with the premise of teaching you how to be productive, then says that you are what you do, then goes to talk about how and why to be nice, then several ending notes describing mindfulness. It also says doing a something without being mindful is the same as doing nothing. The conclusion is: > What you pay attention to is going to be your life. It's so basic that it hits me. But at the same time, there are tons of book that promote automation, see Atomic Habits, which makes it clear that good (automated) habits make your life easier and more productive. So if you spend 50% of your day, doing automated tasks (going to the gym, learning to play the piano, showering, watering the plants, cleaning up your room, etc.) does this mean that you did nothing the entire time? Also, you can both do an automate task and pay attention to it (be mindful) or think of something else (plan things, dream about stuff, get new ideas, etc.).