Focus & Attention

Anything and everything related to focus and attention while living in an era characterized by the shortest attention spans

Hrisikesh Medhi

The proper response to this situation, we’re often told today, is to render ourselves indistractible in the face of interruptions: to learn the secrets of “relentless focus”—usually involving meditation, web-blocking apps, expensive noise-canceling headphones, and more meditation—so as to win the attentional struggle once and for all. But this is a... See more

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Chamath on the importance of slow compounding:

“The faster you build it, that is the half life: it will get destroyed in the same amount of time.”

Things tend to come and go, tip to one side and then the other, tide out and back in, grow and then rot, get created and destroyed, at the same speed.

Good writing is meditative writing. It’s a polished and cohesive train of thought, devoid of superfluous babble. If intrusive thoughts make their way into your writing and you neglect to edit them out, your work will suffer. Quality writing does not arise from a stream of consciousness or absent-mindedness. It’s a practice of meditating on a specif... See more

Jen Hitze • Attention, Distraction, and Your Responsibility

Writing is meditative

Philosophers have been worrying about distraction at least since the time of the ancient Greeks, who saw it less as a matter of external interruptions and more as a question of character—a systematic inner failure to use one’s time on what one claimed to value the most. Their reason for treating distraction so seriously was straightforward, and it’... See more

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Our entire existence is shaped by the orientation of our attention. Each day unfolds as a culmination of the things we choose to focus on from when we wake up until we fall asleep.

Jen Hitze • Attention, Distraction, and Your Responsibility

What we choose to focus on

We’ve all heard the saying about an idle mind, but its true meaning often eludes us. An idle mind is not necessarily indicative of an empty calendar or a lack of to-dos. An idle mind is one that is unaware of its attention’s whereabouts and is incapable of redirecting it

Jen Hitze • Attention, Distraction, and Your Responsibility

Idle mind

It’s almost like boredom doesn’t exist, like difficulty doesn’t exist, scarcity doesn’t exist. And a feeling I’ve been having a lot lately is that scarcity is often what creates meaning. When you’re surrounded by infinite possibilities, when you know around the next corner is another video that might be funnier, you’re never going to sit with the t