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I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored.
I think it's still an issue with people being addicted to phones because I'm sure the lack of daydreaming -- which studies have proven as beneficial and arguibly even a form of microsleep -- is likely causing a lot of the fatigue and inattention people feel; as in their brains are literally being deprived of a natural thing and so are exhausted because of it.
(as an aside: whew what a run-on sentence i have no intention of fixing)
My personal supposition with 0 proof is that the "gen-z stare" is the end-stage of this phenomenon where after being deprived of daydreaming for so long they are essentially "sleeping while standing up" as it were.
Daydreaming should be perfectly acceptable either way, but people seem to think it's weird (concerning, even) when someone spends a bit of time to stand (or sit) around while appearing to be doing nothing at all.
But having a smoke is an activity, and the smoker's participation in this very passive activity assuages the concerns of others.
They are always a good group of people, with a roguish edge as smoking became less acceptable. Usually they are really kind people who represented every part of the the org, and loved some juicy gossip, and I’d learn alot about the informal networks in the company, who the admins were, etc. They would be entertained by my tales of idiocy from a dozen companies. I miss those days!
Then I came back to my desk, saw that I had missed a call or two from my boss and he had a concerned message of where I was. I ignored that and sent him an architecture document an hour later. After years, it is still the backbone of our hosting infrastructure and will go into certification audits later this year.
I sometimes find toilet breaks or coffee breaks (waiting for kettle to boil) fill the “daydream debugging” requirement. But that depends on having a clean bathroom with enough stalls, or an empty kitchen without other people making drinks.
Working from home definitely helps here. Though significantly less so during the holidays when kids are off.
Edit: just in case there’s any misunderstanding, I’m not suggesting having the kids around is a bad thing. I love my kids. Just that they have an obvious impact to my concentration.
Yea sometimes stuff has to sink in or marinate. If you don't give that to yourself then you'll never realize it's gone.
I realized I was missing this because I sometimes sit in my chair and tell myself "this is your life now, you sit in this chair" and I do that for as long as possible. I do this in part because a part of me just doesn't want to do anything: I don't want to work, I don't want to do fun things, I just want to do nothing. So I have an inclination towards being lazy.
But when I'm on that chair and give myself full freedom to do so, then I get agitated and want to do something. I plead with myself really hard. But my lazy part is like "fuck no... we're finally on this chair, I'll die this way, we're never getting off this chair."
And then at some point my mind says something like "FINE, I'LL EVEN DO THE TAX FORM THINGY I HAVE BEEN PUTTING OFF. I'LL DO ANYTHING!"
When I judge the activity to be productive enough, I get off the chair.
The real challenge is that I forget that I have this exercise because it actually works for me and it makes me realize that when you're doing "nothing" your brain is doing a whole lot.
I say something similar in the context of parenting, that a reasonable amount of boredom is good. I think it likely that being constantly entertained makes people more prone to seek constant stimulation.
This did not start with phones either. I am Gen X and it happened in my childhood with kids being dumped in front of TVs. One difference was a lot of adults resisted this and limited hours in front of a TV, whereas now a lot of adults are addicted to phones too.
There's definitely some hedonic treadmill type thing going on with attention and stimuli.
I am not a sleep doctor/therapist nor am I any sort of expert on the subject.
About 5 minutes ago for me, my missus says that I live with my head in the clouds (which is a nicer way of saying if I'm not actively doing something I just zone out and retreat into my own head), I've always been that way all the way back to school (with the inevitable consequences from teachers).
I've mentioned on here before though that I never got addicted to my phone, I don't even know where it is ~80% of the time.
My relationship with technology is (nearly) always intentional, I still access the internet 95% of the time on a desktop PC (which reduces doom scrolling since that just feels wrong on a desktop) so when I walk out my office I'm just "offline" in a very distinct way, if I go for a walk my phone stays at home, everyone who knows me knows I'll answer a text at some point but it could be a day or two.
To sum it up, I resent the passive intrusion of technology into my life.
I hope to find the strength to be more like that. Also to give a better example to others.
I notice making the screen go grayscale (can configure volume up+down to do this in android) already makes doom-anything much less long-lived. The next step, since apparently I can't go cold turkey, is to try one of these alternative minimalist launchers to see if it helps. And to teach people that if they want something from me urgently, they need to call.
On the topic of watches, I used a smartwatch the company gifted me for a while. Went back to an analog watch. Much better.
Personally I struggle to remember any day I haven't had at least 10-15 minutes of idle time doing nothing, just thinking idly, but I still have similar struggles as the author. Although I barely use my phone for things neither.
Sometimes I just turn my phone off and stare at a white wall for 15 minutes. People made fun of me when I told them how relaxing I find white walls, but it seems it turns out, that I'm not the only one doing this?
Back when I was still stuck to a desk in school (up hill both ways and without a pocket computer), I learned that folks would tend to leave me alone if I had a book open. It didn't really matter what book it was.
I could just gaze at it with my eyes relaxed and unfocused, with the printing appearing as some kind of indistinct phoric blur. And as long as I turned the page occasionally, that was good enough to keep the would-be tyrants at bay.
(And then I'd ace the test on Friday, repeat for dozens of weeks, and do it again next year.)
If my mind is not defaulting to daydreaming and rather asking me to find a distraction, doesn't this mean my attention span is worse?
I would also blame the Western commercialization of meditation. I have recently learned that in Buddhism meditation is just one side of the coin, and it’s usually diametrically paired with the opposite technique of contemplation: instead of concentrating into one infinitesimal point, you expand your awareness to encompass the whole of reality. Which is a bit like daydreaming. It’s through these two exercises that one finds the middle path of equanimity.
With technology, we spend our time with narrowed focus, we are told that to stay sane we need to cultivate our focus, and never find the time to release the grip on it, to just let the brain be and expand and relax a bit.
The Taoists had figured it out all along: to find focus, stop focusing so damn much.
Something I do when I struggle to focus is to add different stripped down user accounts to my computer.
I wanted to dabble in rust so I added a user called ~rs that literally only has access to two application hotkeys (via niri). super+enter opens a terminal, F1 opens the offline rust documentation. Yeah I can just log out and scroll HN, but there's a enough friction to that, that it doesn't really happen very often.
> Yeah I can just log out and scroll HN, but there's a enough friction to that, that it doesn't really happen very often.
You can make sure the friction is high by having your password be something difficult to remember, written down on a note, and keeping that note somewhere "out of reach".
My hypothesis is that what's hurting focus and attention is context and task switching. It too easy to open a bunch of tabs and get stuck in the xkcd loop[1] whenever you get stuck or something gets a bit boring, so that becomes a thing you do without thinking about it.
Having mise-en-place workspaces where things that aren't necessary for what you are doing are out of reach, and reaching for them means you have to log off and lose your state, is generally more than sufficient to fix the problem.
It's not that you can't ever check your socials or scroll HN (that wouldn't work for me as part of running a business is a digital presence), you just can't do it while working on something. Makes everything just a little bit more deliberate.
(Also on a practical note, chrome/chromium in app mode is great for this, if you do need to be able to go online, but in a limited sense)
[1] https://xkcd.com/1411/
What an awesome tip!
I wonder how much is real information, i.e. information that truly is related to your life, interests and within your sphere of influence; and how much is just noise that camouflages as information.
It's difficult for me to separate whether this is a result of other changes in my life over time or simply a reflex of ageing in general, though I do think it's a wider societal shift. In the same way that older people find it difficult to watch newer movies (and vice-versa), there is a certain pace associated with culture as well. We have, on average, shifted from books to TikTok in the span of a generation.
I gave up on facebook in 2010 and twitter in 2020ish. I never developed the habit for other social media. I turn off slack and email for the first 45 minutes of each hour. If the server is on fire, call me. That's why I have a phone. Oh, and I have an old-school non-smart phone for phone calls and it often lives in a different room from where I work. I run a TOTP authenticator on a tablet that's not configured to receive any messages.
HN and an occasional YouTube video are my only online distractions. In my advanced age I've lost the desire to tell everyone how wrong they are, which seems to be the national sport of online comments sections. (Though, HN, you're much better than most places.) I've been getting into GMRS lately and it's hard to turn off the radio during work days, but I have been able to do it. Maybe I should write a similar article saying "the net doesn't distract me, but dang if I can't go 10 minutes without thinking about people I know via GMRS."
The author of this piece makes an observation about bullshit vs. attention that is probably worth looking into. My last several jobs have included less bullshit, but a lot more documentation. Which is to say, the docs I write seem to have actual applicability to a real business problem and it's solution. There's little busy work that only serves to prove that a remote VP has more people working for him.
I think what I'm trying to say is a) it is possible to strengthen your attention gland. I'm happy to see the author at least trying. And... b) maybe there's a correlation between perceived bullshit and ability to focus. This needs more research.
Aristotle was on to something when he adopted a peripatetic approach to thinking.
2. How you start your day after sleep creates framing of the brain and you can start iterating on frames and how you drive them depending on your needs. Maybe set a schedule of things to at need done the night before (a continuity thread) maybe boxing the activities to different types at different times. It’s all sciencing the self but the brain is definitely conditioning to things and you have to mind it.
3. ADHD meds from what i’ve read are caffeine on steroids (blocking adenosine receptors, but not really adding to executive function). From personal observation ADHD also feels like a mode one can be put into by wrong brain framing (at least for people not diagnosed).
Getting diagnosed with ADHD and taking meds did the trick for me.
Not sure how relevant this is, since inability to focus was always an issue for me.
Also, I do a lot of things offline. Read physical books, run after work, and tend to stay out of the internet mob altogether. Oh, having no Instagram or Twitter helps a lot.
The faster you realize that we have a limited time on this planet the more ruthless you become with your time. My time is expensive and my employer buys it at a premium. So I am extremely judicious about what I am reading, watching and who I am interacting with.
Building the muscle takes time but it's not that hard afterwards.
You talk to a stranger for a few seconds, say what you're working on, and after 50 minutes you say goodbye. They stay on the video throughout the session, but muted.
It helps me focus because I always think "it's only 50 minutes".
Also, I recently deleted Instagram and it made a huge impact.
My “stack” is self-control for blocking social and Gmail access.
And now I built QuiteCode to focus on deep coding and learning on a more mindful way.
https://gethopp.github.io/quite-code/
That’s shifted now after a few weeks. I’m no longer filling those moments.
The wins are subtle but nice:
- when I watch a movie, I don’t feel the need to start scrolling
- I’m reading at night again. This is far more relaxing and gets me to bed at 9 - 10
- less doom / gloom
- consumption is more intentional. I consider what I am interested in then find, rather than be sucked down the algorithmic vortex of what’s proven to engage me
One of the things that happens to me, is I get "in the zone," usually, when coding. Sometimes, an hour can pass, and I barely notice.
But I am also aware that this is not the way most people are.
Glyphack's experience definitely mirrors my own and I just got diagnosed with ADHD this year and medication absolutely helps my focus.
If you're wondering if you have ADHD this is basically the pre-assessment GPs use in the UK (which then continues to triage and then a full assessment):
https://adhduk.co.uk/adult-adhd-screening-survey/
https://igerman.cc/blog/dopamine-fracking/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440792
Most important — do NOT check any of those the rest of the day.
Some things to try:
- noise cancelling headphones with white noise background (Iceland White or Naturespace apps provide really good quality natural recordings)
- clean desk
- clear split between work and non-work environments
based on my estimate it might be 60%. that's 60% of white collar gdp gone.
I have noticed, the more teams use slack/teams - the teams are usually bigger more than necessary. there's more meetings & less work gets done. more 'quick chats' vs teams who are email first (async) - no immediate response required.
- Learn about basic neuropsychology, to at least have a working understand of the triad Default-Mode-Network, Salience-Network, Executive-Network.
- Watch your ambient CO2, also at night.
- Sleep so that you always wake up with no alarm.
I created this for me https://rainbreak.franzai.com/ to force myself into a break. Into breaking out of the agent loop.
Oh wait, I am one and I can't resist it since day 1 on this world.
I hope the ‘free internet all the time’ era that airlines have been threatening us with for a decade now never arrives.
You just described ADHD.
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If it's a physics textbook, sure, that balance makes sense. If it's Atomic Habits (no offense to that book) then 10 pages is just not equivalent.
I've learned to realize how many times it's boredom or stress triggering the distraction.
I see also other people struggle as much or worse than I do.
Worst is with LLMs and coding agents, I give it a task to work on then go browsing the web, the LLM finishes in 2 minutes but I come back after 10…
At the end of the day, my mind feels super tired even though its the LLM that did the heavy lifting. I also barely remember what I was browsing 15 minutes ago. At this point I can honestly say - Im in trouble.