The Great Attention Heist

Re:The Great Attention Heist by colmvp on Monday January 08, 2018 @09:27AM (#16096885)

It reminds me of Cal Newport's book Deep Work, where he argues those who can deliberately focus in the 21st century and actively deny themselves from being distracted (scheduled e-mail reading, banning Slack, only reading news certain times of the day) and go deep in subject matters will have massive advantages in the knowledge economy. The open office trend certainly hasn't helped. One of my friends who is a ML coder says he'll get 4x done in a single day at home compared to going to work where he gets bombarded by conversations.

After reading many books related to apps and attention (e.g. Hooked!, Irresistible), I elected to give up using Facebook, Instagram, and put heavy restrictions on my habit of going to Reddit/NYTimes/News Websites.

And I'll print things from the web so that I can concentrate on it without distraction in a quiet room with no digital distractions.

When I was younger, I probably called Knuth a luddite for abstaining from e-mail all the way back in the 90s. But wow, my opinion has done a full 180 over the 2010s.

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Re:The Great Attention Heist by cdubzzz on Monday January 08, 2018 @09:44AM (#16097002)

Another thing I did recently - shut off all alerts on my phone other than text messages and Telegram (both of which are pretty rare in my case). Before doing that I would get alerts from my personal email, a family email and multiple work emails. Now I get hardly any alerts and already feel much more productive throughout the work day because these things aren't catching my eye/ear so often. It's really interesting.

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Re:The Great Attention Heist by christophilus on Monday January 08, 2018 @10:22AM (#16097287)

My phone spends 99% of its time either off or in silent mode. I turn it off/down during work hours so I can focus, and then I forget to turn it back on/up. It annoys the crap out of my friends / family, but it's worth it. I use it as an answering machine, GPS, and casual web browser.

What I haven't figured out how to do is do the same thing with work communications (Slack et all). Since I work remotely, it's important that I have a virtual office door that people can knock at. The problem is that if you too often have your door closed on Slack, people complain that you're never available. If you have your door open too often (the default), you always have this nagging feeling that you're going to be interrupted soon, so you may as well not start on anything that requires focus.

^^^ Does anyone here work remotely and have a good solution for this?

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Re:The Great Attention Heist by tomjen3 on Monday January 08, 2018 @11:10AM (#16097681)

Have the door closed during certain hours (slack has a dnd mode, which can be overridden if it is important) then people will learn to contact you during those times, especially if you down prioritise those who accept the system.

You are going to catch some slack, offset that by producing more/better than anyone.

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Re:The Great Attention Heist by tomjen3 on Monday January 08, 2018 @02:22PM (#16099330)

Accept the system -> abuse the system.

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Re:The Great Attention Heist by mantas on Monday January 08, 2018 @03:32PM (#16100190)

> And I'll print things from the web so that I can concentrate on it without distraction in a quiet room with no digital distractions.

Kindle paired with Instapaper or similar service is great too. Saves a tree or three in lifetime as well :)

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Re:The Great Attention Heist by gymshoes on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @07:49AM (#16105751)

I do something similar to the printing thing. I send interesting but long articles to Instapaper. Instapaper delivers them to my Kindle where I read the articles in my downtime.

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