Hallowell and Ratey, who write about ADHD, suggested a new entity for the current world: VAST, the variable attention stimulus trait. It is like ADHD but it is culturally induced and not presumed to be due to an innate deficiency in executive function.

"Beyond the sources of biologically based ADHD, there are a lot of people who act as if they have ADHD but on close inspection turn out not to have the diagnosable condition. These are the people who have ADHD-like symptoms caused by the conditions of modern life. Their “ADHD” is a response to the massive increase in stimuli that now bombard our brains and our world....

"Modern life has trained our brains to go faster and faster, to do more and more, to receive and transmit 24/7, and to require constant stimulation—be it from movies, TV, conversation, even news, as well as the minute-to-minute living of our lives. Most of us can go no more than a few seconds without looking for a screen."

It is likely to me that different people have different breaking points, and so one person may recognize the introduction of the smartphone or debut of TikTok as the point where they lost the ability to focus, and another may date it to the rise of LLMs.

Hallowell, E. M., & Ratey, J. J. (2021). ADHD 2.0: New science and essential strategies for thriving with distraction—from childhood through adulthood.

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.

I've tried multiple things to regain focus, the only ones that worked:

- blocking social media everyday til 2pm(i like working from 5-1 everyday), i use freedom app for that

- having a "distraction" tablet with 2fa on the social media I use, so I can only use distracting things there and not on my computer and iphone.

- when work requires just thinking, I bring my remarkable tablet to a coffeeshop or coworking and work just off of it.

- for avoiding staying behind on social media trends, etc, i built Analog Reader to read newsletters, best tweets from specific people and articles i save for later. It becomes a printed newspaper I can bring anywhere. I have a hacker news edition that runs everyday that showed this article for today and thats why im here lol.

I gave up my smartphone 6 years ago because I concluded the conveniences it offered came at cost of too much of my attention, freedom, and privacy. My ability to focus was just gone, and this magic device was not making me happy or productive anymore.

Within a year, my hyper-focus abilities I remember having as a teen starting flowing back. In the last 5 years I have done the best work of my career, including creating the first fully deterministic Linux distribution, building a community around it, helping start 3 companies, learned endless new skills.

I am not reachable or able to reach the internet every second of every day, and in the modern world that sounds scary. Yet I have a family, an active social life, frequently travel, meet new people every week, co-running two companies while actively developing new tech with daily progress, etc.

All of those things were -accelerated- by me being intentionally offline whenever I am not at a desk.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's really not that hard but people are addicted and don't want to admit it.

Buy an Amazfit 6 watch, has alarms, clock, health stats, memos, weather, maps, and GPS workout.

Turn off nearly all phone notifications. Do not allow any phone to AmaZfit notifications. Don't have your phone physically attached to you.

You need your phone with you? Backpack. Never in pockets.

All sudden it is incredibly easy to focus.

It seems to me that lots of people consider the ability to focus as some kind of innate ability which we are all born with, it's not. It's a learned skill which requires practice. Stop practising and it atrophies.

We all understand this for physical exercise, I think we need to understand the same principles apply to skills.

It seems that so many minor parts of the day don't work as expected and my attention is destroyed by a thousand annoyances. My watch only unlocks my computer 1/3 of the time. My car only recognizes my phone 1/2 of the time. 3/4 of the time I go to press/click on a song I want to hear, the data in the UI updates between the time I start to move to the song and I press/click and I end up hearing something I don't want. Annoying feature that I've disabled n times was re-enabled, and I have to disabled it again. Fighting autocorrect on my phone. I was signed out a service unexpectedly and have to re-authenticate. Programs X, Y, and Z are unresponsive. My VM says my network connection is unstable. My new car beeps because it thinks I'm distracted and then I get more annoyed and distracted.

You’re doing the engineering thing and focusing on the trees instead of the forest. It sounds to me like you have other things going on in your life that you aren’t acknowledging. Often stress and anxiety are primary sources of attention deficit. As we get older more and more stress is piled on us and it becomes even more important to manage it in a healthy way. I encourage you to reflect on your mental health because it might have some clues.

LLM: Attention is all you need. Human: Attention is all we have.

We should be careful where we spend our limited attention on.

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.

For me, AI is a classic tale of maker schedule vs manager schedule, just at massive scale:

https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

Many individual contributors (ICs) are getting introduced to multi-tasking for the first time. When I was an IC, I was really good at getting into flow state and getting solid work done. When I first started managing, I found it really to adjust to constantly multi-tasking.

After several years of managing, I found the opposite - I became really bad at getting into flow state, my brain had been rewired to constantly context switch every 30 seconds.

Now with AI, we're seeing many managers get back into coding again: "Hey! This fits exactly into my mental model! Delegate 5 agents at once and then keep juggling between their responses!". We're also seeing many ICs feel the opposite - much stress from needing to multi-task and constantly context switch.

I don't know if everyone's brain can be rewired for multi-tasking, but I can tell you that for me it took a couple years to adjust. Everyone is on manager schedule now.

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.

I have almost the exact opposite problem.

My focus is as strong as ever, maybe stronger, but as time goes on I notice that it is harder and harder for me to gracefully respond to interruptions.

It's pretty damaging to my relationships. Everyone expects you to drop everything and give people attention and empathy and be the perfect active listener. But I need a cooldown or a change of scenery to leave a task behind.

I've found that the only way I can reliably create focus of late is to put music on. It's as though the music prevents my mind from wandering and/or wondering because it is already being consumed

Literally turn off your internet, within 30 seconds you will understand why you cannot focus and that you developed a severe psychological addiction

It's getting easier to focus every day for me-

Why? I never used any kind of mobile phone or tablet and I use LLM's to automate away the things I don't want to do.

I use a laptop(VOIP for texts and calls), desktop PC, a b6 physical notebook and a sony voice recorder-

B6 notebook(graph) https://www.amazon.com/STALOGY-Editors-notebook-Black-S4104/...

B6 cover with pocket https://www.amazon.com/Raymay-Fujii-CN162B-Notebook-Multi-Co...

Sony voice recorder https://www.amazon.com/Sony-ICDPX370-Digital-Recorder-Built/...

*these pens are zen for drawing and writing https://www.amazon.com/uni-ball-Vision-Needle-Rollerball-Poi...

I take notes/draw constantly as I take the b6 case with me everywhere- I keep the voice recorder in the pocket of the case when I need to dictate an idea, an article, record a song idea or a comedy bit, dictate a blog entry etc-

But all the actual "work" which these days is really just ideas is done on physical paper and a pen or with my speaking voice- no tapping, swiping etc- no notifications or any of that nonsense- so I work outside mostly- in various places- on planes- standing in line- all the places everyone is tapping/swiping onto a screen around me-

It's 10x easier to focus when you are outside and/or in public with a pen and pad in hand and no screens/tech to destroy your attention-

Unsolicited endorsement, but I bought a “Brick” device recently, and I can’t recommend it enough for cutting back on social media. Infinite scroll really destroys your ability to concentrate.

Advice that works: - Watch the Robert Sapolsky human behavior lectures.

- 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.

In terms of solutions on an individual-level: after a lot of trial and error I feel like what works for me is an absolutist cold-turkey-approach. I've pretty much banned all consumptive screen-time except some things like Hacker News, LinkedIn, YouTube (only existing subscriptions, no recommendations or shorts etc). Things I know I won't spend more than 15-20 minutes on and are not highly stimulating and made to high-jack your brain. Initially, I used to allow myself some leeway as in screen-time i.e. should be less than X duration, but it never worked.

The withdrawal-symptoms of going cold-turkey are intense but you get over them eventually and then once you've powered through a few weeks, and you try and go back and look at any type of "content" you see how much trash it all is. Even the "good ones" or things you tell yourself is "educational". Another important note is to have some replacements in place so that when you start seeing that new void of so much time on your hands, you don't feel empty/hollow but as a reminder to yourself that you had so many cool things to do.

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.

My wireless router runs OpenWRT, one day after a particularly embarrassing YouTube binge, I turned on the adblock plugin on my router and configured it to block YouTube as an ad.

It’s turned out to be the best thing I’ve done for myself in a long, long time.

It feels pretty obvious at this point that overstimulating ourselves with a multitude of different apps, social media, short form video, and so on, is hollowing out our capacity to focus. Cal Newport had a great opinion article in the NYT recently that spoke to this, and how reading might help us "train" our minds when so many media are adversely affecting our attention.'

I really noticed this a few years ago to the point that I changed a few things and they have helped.

1. I notice the movement of my attention. I used to default to something like: sit down at my computer to look something up. But before I do that, just check the email. Then I am down some sort of rabbit hole. I did this sort of thing with no awareness or conscious choice. The change is that I notice what I'm doing. Then I can rein it back. I make a choice. (I think scrolling videos gets us into a habit of not choosing what to pay attention to.)

2. Be aware of my curiosity. Try to stay in touch with it. If I get into the space of curiosity I have a lot more juice for sustained attention. Something that helps with this is long form reading, especially fiction (!). I find myself replenished for all my work. The next thing I will try is some group support: silent reading groups where you read together.

3. I have an app on my devices that limits my access to twitter and reddit etc to small windows in the day.

4. Turn off ALL notifications except text messages.

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.

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.

I had the same exact issue. Turns out I have depression. Currently I'm on meds, therapy and functioning on 80% my ability but it's still better than near 0

It will continue to be a mystery only solvable by the dwindling number of people clever enough to combat the problem with strategies like the many offered here.

Until the real problem is identified...which IMO is that programming itself is just harder to concentrate on in 2026 than it was in 1989. There are way too many possibilities of how to do things, and way too much difference between a good choice (say getting Claude to do it) and a bad one (say, writing a linked-list traverser yourself). Humans work well with the few variables involved in creating things like that linked-list traverser. But they require tons more energy if everything is on the table. Right library? Right platform? Right coding agent? Right way to keep myself from getting distracted?

In contrast, doing almost anything else seems like a relief for your brain.

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 guess “all you need is attention” is a good reflection of ourselves as well AI.

I’m off anything with an algorithmic feed. My brain can’t handle these. I turn off shorts and YouTube auto play using iOS safari extensions. I block the linked in feed. I read a handful of blogs via rss. The most regular feed I check is HN a few times a day. I’m reading books again for the first time in a decade or so.

It feels good and certainly not worse than before.

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.

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

You're just getting older and realizing something about yourself. The only way to preserve your attention is to guard it like a jewel. It is a learned behavior once you enter the real world.

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

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).

I wonder how old the author is. Losing the ability to stay focused on tasks is a pretty common aging symptom. I have felt it now that I'm in my 40s

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.

> So how can I regain my ability to focus?

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.

I can attest to experiencing virtually everything the author describes here. I admire the ability to articulate these mundane-sounding challenges that greatly impact your quality of life.

One of the best ways I have found not to get distracted while in a task, with other more interesting or something that you do not want to forget, is NOT to use your device to do it or even add to your TODO, or note it down but to use an actual notebook (may be a small memo note) to quickly write out and continue with your current task/more.

When you are done, visit and parse your sidenotes.

Of course, the are the usual No Notifications, timers, etc.

This week I've got all the feeds: slack, email, ticketing system, dev story board, prod system health, prod user activity, prod job queues -- all coming to one dashboard. They are distilled by a local LLM, when I get bursts it offloads to Google's low cost Flash lite so I only read the essential text, no threads, no scrolling and scanning to get to the content.

It's freaking amazing, I know everything going on. I can look at it every half hour and be caught up in three minutes. I double click about one in ten messages to reply and it takes me right to the source app to reply.

In my case, I'm "on the spectrum," so focus isn't a problem. In fact, too much focus can be a problem.

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.

Consider turning off the internet before you go to bed and not turning it on for at least 1 hour after you wake up. I think I got this idea from Craig Mod (who I believe does no internet until after lunch). I've been doing this for a few months. The initial hour is really good (very easy to e.g. read or work calmly on some software projects without distraction) but I also find it puts me in the right mindset for the rest of the day.

Claude Code has made my computer as - or even more - addicting as social media.

I created this for me https://rainbreak.franzai.com/ to force myself into a break. Into breaking out of the agent loop.

  7 minutes for short, 21 for a long break.

Rather ironic: I was in the process of moving all Android apps to a second user to be able to stop all apps (and just not DnD, because I'll know I may have some messages waiting for me after disabling DnD) when I got distracted by HN (just one tiny minute).

Another thing I'm testing is having VPN OFF with its kill-switch ON.

As much as I love and embrace LLMs, they are clearly eliminating all flow state that was previously inevitable when coding something

Sounds like the answer may be simpler than it seems. You could just be tired. You said you’ve been balancing a lot for years and years. Take some time to just focus on yourself.

Meditate, go on walks, wake up earlier, always have breakfast, and for the love of all that is good, get enough sleep.

> Unfortunately it’s not possible anymore because people in Iran cannot have a stable internet connection nowadays

Even the fellas in Iran are struggling with staying focused..

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.

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.

Pretty much the reason why I reset my X password, sent that to a friend then used HN for my tech news fix instead.

On HN eventually there isn't much interesting stuff on the front page, on X it pulls you in with great effectiveness

I feel quite the same (struggle basically) as the OP.

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/

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.

dopamine fracking.

https://igerman.cc/blog/dopamine-fracking/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440792

I think exposure (or multiple) to SARS-CoV-2 should be taken under consideration when talking about all of this..

This is me. I hate it. I'm working though (ever so slowly) The Global Village by Marshall McLuhan and I really like the metaphor technology going from Visual to Acoustic. Put another way the past had a serial enforcement we don't have today with always-on connections and easy access to distractions.

I've been trying to introduce more friction into my life to make doing harder things the right thing. 1. I have a rooted Orchid F1 flip phone with Telegram and Firefox focus. Telegram lets me TTS to an openclaw instance if I need to get something "out" but long interactions are awful with the small screen and latency. Firefox focus is also terrible in all the right ways. If I'm out and HAVE to search for something this is enough of a break glass solution but for the most part it's just calls and texts. 2. I carry an xteink x3 for books. I'm trying to read more so this being the only thing available has me reaching for it more than I'd normally do.

I don't have a good solution for things at work yet. Maybe I'll start blocking all websites or doing strict pomodoros.

I do have this problem. Its not caused by my age or mental decline. Its simply too many things happening too fast, to many people asking questions and too many topics to pursue without any pause.

Work, family, life, world around you, all scream „me now, my problem, do this, do that, watch this, listen to that”.

Its exhausting. Humans are not built to be constantly in overdrive. I just want to sit and have peace of mind.

Issue is the moment you hit the breaks - „you lose” sign pops up and well.. you fade away. Maybe its a good thing?

Water, fish oil, vitamin d, and food. If i forget any of these I have the same symptoms.

My 10 cents lately, pink noise. Blocks out a lot of distraction and helps focus.

Long walks with no phone help me come back with a lot of focus and less stress.

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 !

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.

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 listened to the dose effect [1] and that has really helped me get my attention back.

I’ve deleted TikTok and now get blocks of focused work done and I haven’t been this effective or happy in years.

I genuinely believe the next generation will be defined by people who can and who cannot focus their attention and get stuff done.

[1] https://open.spotify.com/show/2YCIVADHhUbpTtuCIvV7dG?si=lOiV...

I don’t know if this helps, as kids don’t make it easier BUT they do make you much more aware of how valuable your time is. One free hour as a parent feels like a full free day to someone without kids.

TL;DR get kids.

"It feels like my brain finds a way to do something else and avoid painful situations like boredom or hard work."

You just described ADHD.

YouTube is really the thing that got me - the thing is it's not bad content, I don't watch slop, I watch quality stuff from interested, passionate individual creators and I could listen to them talk about their interests all day.

It doesn't wreck my day or make me feel anxious or anything, no doom scrolling involved, but it sure can turn into a huge time sink very fast.

I'm in the same boat as OP.

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.

> I am waiting for something then I go browse the web and I get distracted.

I firmly believe that we've gotten so used to always-at-hand phones/apps that we can no longer handle spending a few minutes doing "nothing". I see this in my teenager.

The OP may or may not struggle with ADHD, but this is something that IMO isn't ADHD but rather a new pervasive trait across our modern society. Everything must be instant now. Emails and now chats must be replied to instantly. Service/delivery must be as instant as possible. No more waiting, no more "doing nothing". We're all operating at high speed, even during our "down time". And for no good reason -- we're just inflicting this on ourselves.

A habit that I've taken up which makes me quite happy and I think solidly helps my focus is working offline.

Some days, I'll set a timer for two hours, and then just work offline for those two hours.

I have most of the documentation for tools I use available offline, I'm a bit math enjoyer so I have like 5GB of maths textbooks/papers to study, and programming offline, especially when you've got docs for everything you use, is not only still doable in the LLM age, but also quite enjoyable :)

Reading the article, basically all of the distractions the author mentions are internet-based (HN, LLMs), so perhaps adopting an offline work habit might help them too :)

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.

I agree with this article, but I found the easiest ways to work on my focus are the following:

- Don't use social media. It's all garbage and counterproductive for your attention. Once you stop using it, you start to forget it exists.

- Always carry a Kindle, and when you're bored, read instead of reaching for other apps or games.

- Try to read 15 minutes before work, 30 minutes during lunch, and 15 minutes after work. That's an hour of reading a day — enough to get through a lot of books and papers.

- If you use an elliptical, read while on it. It takes practice, but it can be done.

You will see the biggest gains by saying bye to social media.

I got a secure computer room professionally installed.

Check your diet. ADD/ADHD has been linked to histamine intolerance.

Perhaps we should learn from the ADHDs on how to resist the dopamine hacks.

Oh wait, I am one and I can't resist it since day 1 on this world.

And yet people are still happily driving 10 LLM sessions concurrently.

idk discipline? try retraining your brain on non-digital activities. Pick a long running non-digital activity and gitrdone.

Dude needs a vacation.

> So how can I regain my ability to focus?

Read.

Not the zennial definition of listen to a podcast – actual books.

Here's how to reboot your reading.

Do this during a break, when you have a couple weeks. Or schedule a couple hours in the evenings. But make the time be a "habit" block that you require yourself to do. (Something else has to give – consider letting your streaming queue get longer for a bit. And replace your HN bookmark with https://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ … seriously!)

1. Start with trash, an "airport novel" type with giant print double spaced lines so the short story looks like a proper book. Pure story dopamine.

2. Then one with normal print and single spaced lines with enough substance to engage meta or systems thought as you read, maybe a Len Deighton or Eric Ambler if you're feeling able. Your brain relearns getting to think doesn't actually hurt.

3. Next shift into non-fiction. Something about Norway's heavy water sabotage against Nazi Germany, for instance; or preferably something field-adjacent to your field, with both narrative and knowledge. Re-priming your dopamine to hit from knowledge too.

4. Finally move into your own field, now knowledge you haven't been able to stick with to learn but wanted to. For this read something from a genuine practitioner, not the LinkedIn-fluencer TED talk transcripts in book form that top charts these days. Leveling up is its own reward.

Once you've made it through that, you should (a) be able to read again, (b) be able to focus on semantic processing, (c) regain your ideas to words to ideas mapping necessary for product/platform systems analysis or software engineering.

Importantly, prefer physical books or (“try this one cool trick!”) a full A4 or 8.5"x11" page e-paper tablet turned landscape, set up to read 2 pages side by side. When this is configured right (smallest margins, right font and line size) ending up same size as a paperback. The retention of two pages at a time, and the fewer page turns (fewer, larger, memory chunks) per book, is better for regaining focus and better for improving working memory. The smaller the font you can still read quickly and easily, the better, for the same reason.

Set your black mirror devices out of reach during the time block, don't have the TV on, ideally no music, or (“try this one cool trick too…”) while reading the first book on your list: play music in a language you don't understand but that sounds reasonably close to your own. For English speakers, germanic or romance languages are good. This makes your language centers busy wanting to comprehend the audio channel along with your visual channel, so your brain eats up the book without your mind wandering.

Using the method above, you can work to being able to sit with and absorb hardbound textbooks in just a series of 4 or 5 escalating challenges.

You'll find you regained intraday focus as well.

• • •

PS. Did you update that bookmark? Yesterday's HN Daily happens to be relevant as is so often the case: https://resobscura.substack.com/p/quality-non-fiction-books-...