People often question me how I manage to focus for more than a few minutes and I'm always confused because back in the day I was constantly informed I didn't have any focus and needed to be treated (adhd).
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.
As much as I’d like to leave my phone in another room while working, 2FA has made that impossible. I’m now required to keep my phone nearby and pick it up periodically throughout the day, all in the same of security.
> 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.
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.
There's only one important thing that I miss about smoking: A smoke break was an excuse that was tolerated by others, wherein I could go outside and just let my mind wander (daydream) with no particular goal for a short period of time.
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.
Some of my deepest architectural work honestly happened... in a hammock on the balcony, while alternating between staring at a cloud, the sun, and two magpies building a nest in the birch tree while yelling at me occasionally.
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.
It’s an option, but it’s worth noting that you’re not always idling your brain in quite the same way unless you happen to work somewhere were there are no roads to cross, cars and cyclists to dodge, nor other pedestrians to navigate around.
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.
I think they’re saying that you could say “I’m going for a smoke break” at work and it was at least tolerated. I don’t think you can say “I’m going for a walk” the same way.
We had 3pm coffee club at a previous job. It was great. Had our own slack channel(public). As the minutes counted down people would post gifs counting down (/giphy 4, /giphy 3). Most of the dev team would go. We’d go a heavy coffee shop. The talks there and back were great.
It has varied a bit depending on the timeline, but: Going out for a walk (or to just change environments and very passively stare at nothing) has been less socially-acceptable than going out for a smoke, in my experience.
One of these things is weird, or perhaps inducing of ire ("How dare he just go outside when he feels like it! What is he even doing?").
The other is, at worst, both understandable and disgusting ("Of course he's out there again with that filthy habit!").
You don’t necessarily want to daydream. If you’re not careful, it becomes Negative rumination and mind wandering and that wouldn’t be as useful as an actual nap or a workout or meditation.
I agree. I am not sure it is as similar to sleep as you claim, but its definitely good for your brain.
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.
I remember when cable TV used to be "addictive". Now I can't watch even 10 minutes of it without getting bored and pulling out my phone. Also something I learned recently: checking your phone at the movies is no longer the faux pas that it used to be.
There's definitely some hedonic treadmill type thing going on with attention and stimuli.
Think the difference is between "using your phone", meaning calling someone and audibly talking to someone, thus disrupting the movie for others, and "checking your phone", which is just looking at it, though inaudibly, though there might be some amount of light pollution depending on the screen brightness. First one has and will continue to be taboo, second one however, in my experience, used to be viewed with distaste, but is pretty common nowadays.
I’ve asked people sitting nearby to stop checking their phone as the glare can be very distracting. I might be immersed in the film but keep getting pulled out of the story by the distractingly bright light.
I also try to patronise cinemas that remind viewers at the start of the screening not to use their phone at all. I stopped going to the Cineworld near me because there was too much phone use (both calls and checking alerts) – and Cineworld had stopped the reminders at the start of the film for people to switch off their phone.
Well I made no claim of it being related to sleep; just that I've read a lot of claims that it's related to microsleep and used "sleeping while standing up" for the last bit as an analogy.
I am not a sleep doctor/therapist nor am I any sort of expert on the subject.
That's a very interesting perspective but now that you mention it, I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed, even when I'm not on a device. Curious if phone usage or whatever doom-scrolling we do exhausts the same part of the brain that we use to daydream.
> I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed
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.
> And to teach people that if they want something from me urgently, they need to call.
There is a half way step (on Android at least, I assume Apple has similar) you can set "Do Not Disturb" and then white list the people who can message/call through the "Do Not Disturb" so you are reachable but only by people you trust/want to be able to reach you.
> On the topic of watches, I used a smartwatch the company gifted me for a while.
I just didn't use one, I have a rough rule that introducing new technology into my life has to be a complete and obvious unalloyed win or I just don't, it's a very high bar for a new technology to clear but it also means I don't spend money on things that end up in drawers because they either turned out not to meet the hype or just annoyed the living hell out of me after the initial "oooh shiny" wore off.
My big discovery a few years ago was uninstalling apps, especially social media apps. I don't mind the platforms, but removing their ability to ping notifications up was massive. I watch some people just get their phone out to dismiss a load of notifications for 20s. It's a chore now. I think limiting notifications is the best thing you can do, on your phone and your watch.
Willpower's not the solution. When we isolated cocaine from the coca leaf for the first time, the world pretty much went insane. In those first years people were injecting it into their eyeballs and spines. The most popular beverage on earth in 2026 STILL contains extract of the coca leaf as a holdover from the days when it was laced with its namesake, Coke. People were smoking cocaine, ingesting cocaine, giving it to their kids for a toothache, pretty much anything you could stick it in, they did.
The solution to this wasn't willpower, it was to get rid of all that fucking cocaine. There's a reason you don't have the stuff lying around your house today, if you did you'd probably get hooked. In 2026 we're basically speedrunning the coke boom with infotech.
So once again the solution is: get rid of it. Any time you're in a low stimulus environment, remove the tech so that you don't HAVE to exercise willpower. That means turning off the phone and the watch and maybe stuffing them in a drawer in another room or something. That's all it takes.
I can't say how society will look back at this moment in history 150 years from now. But I do know I'm way happier and more relaxed when I just shut off the devices and put them away. When I'm at home or in the office, my phone's on mute, in a drawer/bag/other room, and I don't think about it unless I take it out for a few minutes to order a delivery or do a 2fa or something. At night it's simply turned off. I'll never own a smart watch. I still keep the phone on me when I go out and haven't found that to be a huge concern because if I'm at a bar or something it's competing with a lot of other stimuli for attention. We were never 100% available to anyone for all of human history until the last 10-20 years. I am not opting into this current Cocaine Moment.
I honestly don't think it is willpower, it is simply that I never had to break the "addiction" because I never had it in the first place.
I always found the form factor extremely limiting compared to a desktop (it's the same reason my laptop ended up running a TV upstairs, the idea of programming on the sofa sounded great but in practice I'd get frustrated and immediately retreat to my quiet downstairs office with multiple screens when I had to do something tricky/requiring concentration).
Where I do use something that optimises for distractions, I look for how to minimize the distractions (e.g YouTube - I use the excellent Unhook (with Ublock Origin) which turns the YT home page into a search box and little else, hides mixes, shorts and other distractions) and make it work for me.
I sometimes pause shows or YT videos I'm watching just to daydream for a little bit about something that just crossed my mind. Additionally I go outside at least once a day to walk or ride my bicycle, which also helps with this.
That's interesting. What happens if you just sit there doing nothing, looking around and what not? Does your brain start to wander by itself?
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.
I think its unfortunate people wear headphones while walking/running/biking. If you don’t, that’s however many minutes or hours of nothing but daydreaming (and hearing nature).
Sadly around here it takes quite a lot of driving to get to anywhere that nature sounds predominate. Between the highways/airports/lawncare it is mostly noise pollution, and I generally find that doesn't work as well for daydreaming.
> That's a very interesting perspective but now that you mention it, I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed, even when I'm not on a device.
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?
I found that people would make fun of me for that, too, if they were made aware of it.
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.)
> 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.
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?
The gen z stare is being unable or unwilling to give a verbal response when one is expected mostly as a result of social anxiety and lack of communication skills IMO.
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.
I think it's just information overload. There's so much information everywhere now clamoring at you for attention. Our brains aren't made for processing this much information. Going on a media diet helps. Going completely offline helps even more.
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".
I don't think it's helpful to increase the friction more than it already is, then it just becomes annoying, which makes it more likely you'll stop working like this. You don't have to become a desert father to fix your attention.
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)
> I think it's just information overload. There's so much information everywhere now clamoring at you for attention. Our brains aren't made for processing this much information. Going on a media diet helps. Going completely offline helps even more.
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.
Here's something that worked for me: put your phone in your pocket and go on a design walk. While walking, design the next step in whatever you're working on. Design walks work great with more than one person, too.
Aristotle was on to something when he adopted a peripatetic approach to thinking.
A lot of people here are focusing on ADHD, but I think the author is commenting on a different phenomenon, because they were able to concentrate before and now it's just much harder. I feel it and many people I talk to feel it as well.
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.
Living in Seattle saved me. In the winter months I started waking up and sitting in front of a SAD light for half an hour. I almost immediately got bored so I started reading long-form books (with the occasional short story) in front of the light for an hour each morning.
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.
I’ve started evaluating what seem like brain “modes”. 1. Constant flow of information with disjointed context (social media, brain fracking, moving in a crowd) triggers hunter-gatherer instinct that is hard to stop. The dopamine seek in a way. Even if you stop your brain seeks it, so unless you really need this mode for work, it helps to postpone or time box these to the end of the day (kind of like some would do with drinking alcohol).
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).
Yes, I feel like my brain is fried by dopamine dispensers, it's very bad and I have no clue how to get control back. At least I have some healthy routines in my days but it really does feel like being addicted to a hard drug.
There exist problems which cause years of suffering which can be solved in hours (sometimes minutes). Not every problem is like that, of course, but some are. Procrastination is like that, sometimes posture is like that, and mental effects of social media are like that. At least for now - this may get worse with time. But the solution is not to consume more content - books seem to be a common suggestion. It is to consume no content. Humans evolved to grind most of the time with a little excitement and entertainment now and again, but tech has inverted this. Its "what we want" in the same way a child wants sugar all the time, and its at once addictive and unhealthy. The screen is an insidious habit former and I'm not sure yet if there is any healthy level or use for some people.
That won't help. I can get engrossed in a book/film/videogame I like. Most day-to-day task are not as interesting though. The problem is being able to concentrate on an activity that doesn't get you instant gratification.
I regained my focus after many years and it had nothing to do with distractions for me, distractions were only a way of fighting stress that constantly appeared. The stress was the underlying issue. I worked on that in therapy (breaking away from my parents) and I can now work on what I want for hours at a time. It's because now I feel I can become my own person and do what I want while not being chained to the past anymore.
Something I really grew to hate over my time at various software firms were complex and flaky stacks with big test loops, and it's exactly this kind of reason why. Ideally, I have a problem, I want to put my head in the problem space and stay focused there until it's done. Every time a test suite takes five minutes to run, or I have to look up some obscure docs in my web browser, or I have to go somewhere else to rebuild a failing service, is an off-ramp to that flow state, and that's where I lose a whole hour to procrastination.
Not relatable. "Internet is not real, and strangers' opinions don't mean anything" is an ethos that I have been religiously following for as long as I can remember.
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.
I'm using an app called Focusmate (no affiliation) on a daily basis - scheduling 5-6 hour sessions per day.
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.
I recently deleted social media from my phone. With nothing left, I found myself compulsively checking HN anytime I had a free moment.
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
It seems like I have challenges with both extremes, I can get pulled into my work and not look up again for 10 hours. But with virtually everything else, I have no energy to see it through. It is rare for me to watch a movie from start to finish. I used to be able to shut off my brain.
The author doesn’t mention it, so it seems appropriate to suggest asking a doctor for attention deficit disorder screening. The cultural forces in play encouraging us to flit and switch constantly are a perfect distraction from the possibility one’s own brain is complicit.
I would caution a little against the prevailing wisdom of diagnosis-as-panacea. I've had a diagnosis for most of my life, but never seen stimulants as worth it (admittedly I've not tried them long term, but that's because after reading a whole lot about it I don't want it in my body). I don't think the diagnosis changes anything for me other than that. It's very much a case of "now what". I suppose some people find a great weight lifted from their shoulders at the idea others struggle with the same thing, or that their struggles aren't due to a personal failing. But I can't escape the next step which is that you still have to do go out and do all the same stuff anyway...
Symptoms become more obvious as you age, which can feel like it came on later. As part of an assessment they do go through your childhood - if you had trouble in school for example that's a classic ADHD symptom, but there's a lot more to consider. It's not always obvious and I've met plenty of people in their 30s, 40s, 50s who only just realized they had it this year and got assessed.
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):
Except ADHD was there long before the machines, and stimulants have been scientifically proven time and time again to be helpful in treating ADHD at a very minimal sides effects cost.
one day maybe in 30 years - research is gonna come out - on how much a hit on productivity Slack/teams was.
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.
Regarding the urge to “check what’s out there”, one simple rule I follow is: spend around an hour in the morning catching up with HN, a few reddits, a couple newsletters,
and Bluesky. I completely avoid Twitter/X and LinkedIn, trusting that anything significant enough bubbles up to those other places.
Most important — do NOT check any of those the rest of the day.
So you start your day passively scrolling and dopamine front-loading which basically sets the tone for the whole day… I think the “right” way is the exact opposite which is to start the day dopamine-starved and context-free and only scroll at the end of the day
Agree with this one and can vouch for it, for a while while living closer to nature I would start my day by drinking water and taking a walk in the forest, actively avoiding screens for my first hour awake. I need to find something similar to do now, maybe water the plants...
This sounds a little bit like ADHD, but the common advice of getting medication isn't always applicable. Yes, it is definitely worth finding out if you have ADHD and diagnosing it, because if you do, it will help you understand yourself much better and might prevent problems further down the road like anxiety and depression. But medication isn't always the answer. ADHD might be entirely manageable for some people if their work is interesting enough.
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
This is a real problem, a long time in the making. Over fifty years ago advertising started to affect the way people thought: I argue that they trained people to not be content with a classic simple life. Fast forward to the best tech focused on messing with people's attention. I like Center for Humane Technology for discussions of tech that is designed to help people, not control them.
Strangely I think it's why I like roadtrips so much. Sitting doing absolutely nothing for even 15 minutes is difficult for me, but I can drive for hours doing nothing but watching the world go by, even without music or podcasts on, and it's fine. And that feels good.
The standards we set are off: I recently discovered 75 hard, and it's mind-boggling to me that the mental equivalent of "do two separate workouts, 45 minutes each" is "read 10 pages of a non-fiction book."
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.
As it happens I'm currently working on an app to help with this problem, effectively a soft habit tracker designed for daily reflection and mindful progression. It touches on some of the themes in this HN thread - helping create quiet space, time away from stimulation.
It's an early stage, fully functional but I'm looking for beta users. If you're interested in helping out or simply trying the app, please complete the form on https://coghance.com !
This feels so familiar. Since more than a year or so Im witnessing more and more content being produced. One year ago or so it was enough to visit HN main page once a day and be up to day. These day, it needs a visit every few hours, the main page changes constantly.
Not only that but also the amount of content received via newsletters.
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.
I can focus at home. I have a terrible time focusing in the open office floor plan at work. I have to wear noise-canceling headphones just to cut down on some of the noise. Even then, people are constantly stopping by to chit-chat or make small talk. I hate it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Except: My involvement in these activities doesn't leave much, if any, room for the kind of detachment that daydreaming requires.
It has varied a bit depending on the timeline, but: Going out for a walk (or to just change environments and very passively stare at nothing) has been less socially-acceptable than going out for a smoke, in my experience.
One of these things is weird, or perhaps inducing of ire ("How dare he just go outside when he feels like it! What is he even doing?").
The other is, at worst, both understandable and disgusting ("Of course he's out there again with that filthy habit!").
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 also try to patronise cinemas that remind viewers at the start of the screening not to use their phone at all. I stopped going to the Cineworld near me because there was too much phone use (both calls and checking alerts) – and Cineworld had stopped the reminders at the start of the film for people to switch off their phone.
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.
There is a half way step (on Android at least, I assume Apple has similar) you can set "Do Not Disturb" and then white list the people who can message/call through the "Do Not Disturb" so you are reachable but only by people you trust/want to be able to reach you.
> On the topic of watches, I used a smartwatch the company gifted me for a while.
I just didn't use one, I have a rough rule that introducing new technology into my life has to be a complete and obvious unalloyed win or I just don't, it's a very high bar for a new technology to clear but it also means I don't spend money on things that end up in drawers because they either turned out not to meet the hype or just annoyed the living hell out of me after the initial "oooh shiny" wore off.
The solution to this wasn't willpower, it was to get rid of all that fucking cocaine. There's a reason you don't have the stuff lying around your house today, if you did you'd probably get hooked. In 2026 we're basically speedrunning the coke boom with infotech.
So once again the solution is: get rid of it. Any time you're in a low stimulus environment, remove the tech so that you don't HAVE to exercise willpower. That means turning off the phone and the watch and maybe stuffing them in a drawer in another room or something. That's all it takes.
I can't say how society will look back at this moment in history 150 years from now. But I do know I'm way happier and more relaxed when I just shut off the devices and put them away. When I'm at home or in the office, my phone's on mute, in a drawer/bag/other room, and I don't think about it unless I take it out for a few minutes to order a delivery or do a 2fa or something. At night it's simply turned off. I'll never own a smart watch. I still keep the phone on me when I go out and haven't found that to be a huge concern because if I'm at a bar or something it's competing with a lot of other stimuli for attention. We were never 100% available to anyone for all of human history until the last 10-20 years. I am not opting into this current Cocaine Moment.
I always found the form factor extremely limiting compared to a desktop (it's the same reason my laptop ended up running a TV upstairs, the idea of programming on the sofa sounded great but in practice I'd get frustrated and immediately retreat to my quiet downstairs office with multiple screens when I had to do something tricky/requiring concentration).
Where I do use something that optimises for distractions, I look for how to minimize the distractions (e.g YouTube - I use the excellent Unhook (with Ublock Origin) which turns the YT home page into a search box and little else, hides mixes, shorts and other distractions) and make it work for me.
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.
What an awesome tip!
> 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/
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.
Aristotle was on to something when he adopted a peripatetic approach to thinking.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.