Attention is All You Have

I recently started to review the way I worked. The first thing I did was track the time I spent on my computer, and how I spent it. How to say this? The results were bad.

Entertainment was one of the first categories on the list. It made me feel weird, because it opened my eyes to a lot of things. I became really attentive to what I was doing, and I noticed that my coding sessions were punctuated by a lot of time spent on YouTube, Twitter, and other platforms of this kind. I could not get in the zone anymore, and I didn’t even notice it.

These small sessions were only ¹⁵⁄₂₀ minutes each time. However, if we add them up for each day, it amounts to hours wasted on trivial stuff. Because let’s face it, most of the content on YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, and Instagram is just dumb. It is only made to capture your attention, not to help you or to teach you anything. Even when some really smart content is published, it is not made visible to the masses, because it will not generate enough engagement.

Focus is the most important thing one can have. For a simple reason, it is how we spend the most important resource we have: our time. Sadly, it took me years to understand that, and even more years to acknowledge and act on it.

You stop reading long and complex content, because you only want your small shot of fast-paced entertainment. If the video uses complicated words or lasts more than 8 minutes, you’re already gone. You need to scroll on TikTok, watch that last video on YouTube, or check the stream of this new guy on Twitch. Either way, you’re wasting time instead of pushing your own stuff.

The same thing happens on Twitter with the discussions around frameworks or languages. People follow the last trend, start using the newest stack recommend by their favourite influencers… They follow, they forget.

I am not saying that entertainment is bad. Everyone should have the right to spend their free time how they want. I am trying to say that boredom is good, focus is amazing. We don’t need to be overstimulated every second of our life. In fact, I still think that building anything great requires to enjoy being bored.

In my case, building a productivity worklow in the terminal made me more focused. I also started blocking any websites that I qualified as a time waster, stopped multitasking, and took reading more seriously. All these small changes improved my focus, and made me a little more bored sometimes, but that’s perfectly fine.

This post is a bit far from what I usually write about, but I wanted to share this small piece.