I know this isn't the directly the topic of the article but the title "attention is your scarcest resource" reminds me that I wish there was some pledge/badge of "we will not intentionally distract you and provide options to reduce distractions" pledge for apps and websites.<p>It drives me nuts for example that discourse has "achievements" to distract you. Every discourse forum I join for customer service is yet another 15 distracting achievements begging for my attention. It's not that I care about the achievements, it's that it's the same notification system that I got a new message so I'm compelled to go see if the highlight is a new message and when it turns out it's not, it's a dumb achievement badge then my time has been wasted and my mind has been distracted.<p>Multiply this by 50 apps to 100 apps/sites etc and it's clear that features as such that can't be turned off are irresponsible toward and disrespectful of users. That idea that you're a bad person if you design and create such distractions needs to spread.
I think the most salient point of this blog is pretty much buried as the closing thought. It’s pretty hard to be a good engineering manager when you also have programming responsibilities (IC work). Sure, you can debate about what the different hacks are to try and work around this and do a good job in spite of the difficulty, but it’s a lot easier to just go full-time managing.<p>In my experience it takes six or more people to fully occupy a manager. Ten seems to be about perfect. You can go higher than that (and many do) but at a certain point you’re not evenly investing in all your people anymore, you’re mostly focusing on a few at a time.<p>Obviously the hardest part of this is if you don’t have 6+ people to manage. My answer to very small teams is not to have a manager at all, just have a technical lead and trust that a group of 1-5 people can work out their own crap.
My most plausible scenario for the Singularity now is someone figuring out how to augment short term memory with implants.<p>I think we are going to find that attention is dominated by working set memory, and people who can juggle even twice as much stuff are going to operate fundamentally differently than those who can’t afford or won’t have the surgery. And past 5x it may become difficult to even communicate, much less compete.
"everything is downstream from controlling attention" - Joscha Bach on the Lex AI podcast <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2P3MSZrBM&t=3s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2P3MSZrBM&t=3s</a>
a key insight for me in this article is this one: "In order for bullshit not to distract me for the rest of the week, I try to minimize my number of “open loops”—projects or processes that I’ve started but not completed."<p>I hadn't realized that I probably keep way too many "open-loops" in my life. And they are draining away my attention-currency.
From Rebecca Rozelle-Stone's <i>Simone Weil and Theology</i>: "For Weil, attention is the decreative release of self to receive the world in all its reality. Paradoxically, this (passive) letting go of self and accompanying control is simultaneously a “creative” action: attention sees what is invisible (as the good samaritan saw the bleeding, anonymous, dirty man in the ditch) and hears what has been deprived of a voice because the din and smog generated from our maintenance of control has finally cleared."
50% of your time and energy seems like an impossible bar. At 16 waking hours, we are talking about 8 hours spent entirely on focusing on some task. That’s like the hyper optimistic assumptions of time spent that lead to bad estimates in software. I would say even the 10x engineers I met only focused for 5-6 hours a day max, so 30% focus.
He mentions timeboxing. Does anyone know of a good way to do this on ios with certain sites?<p>The built in blocking with downtime is nowhere near granular enough, and it is rather easy to turn off. Do any third party browsers or apps have schedules for viewing certain sites?<p>Eg on mac I have an app, coldturkey, which blocks certain urls during the workday.
I also find that 100 things to do as a manager is a misconception. Doing 100 things well in a day is impossible. Picking the 3 to do super-well and doing those. Yields the best results.<p>Especially because those 3 are unlikely to come back.
> In the short term, this made me less efficient, because I’d spend less time programming and more time staring vacantly at the ceiling.<p>> As a manager, it became impossible to “only work on one thing:” there were too many small tasks and too many projects going on in parallel.<p>As someone with ADHD, thank you for that reminder.<p>It is an obvious issue that is hard to be aware of.
(*: For clarity - EM = Engineering Manager, IC = Individual Contributor)<p>I recently transferred to a team with an explicit intent for me to be an EM on that team. A few months down the road they said I wasn't meeting expectations because of my "time management" which had too many meetings and lacked focus time for IC work - which definitely was not my 50%+ focus. I'm "winning" the resulting political war (my last 1:1 left my lead in tears), but only in the limited sense that I'm not getting fired; it's been a bit of a disaster for everyone.<p>The unclear expectations of what gets someone an EM role and what is expected of that role is the root of my problem, some of the author's, and a lot of the industry's as a whole.<p>Leaders are picked from those that are truly focused on tech and truly excel at it... and then told not to do that. How can somebody be "intuitively, emotionally invested in the outcome" of tech work and then suddenly be expected to stop doing it?<p>I should have been that rare counter-example in that I got picked for this role because of my very visible leadership in other areas. However, when it came time to give me the position formally they fell back on code output and found it somewhat lacking (specifically, the number of commits I made while onboarding was less than those of my established teammates).<p>There's a school of thought that switching back and forth between IC and EM tracks lets you build a lot of knowledge and be both better manager and IC (the author evidently did). While I do think experience with each helps you do the other, there is a cost to that focus shifting. This isn't like the cost of only being able to code in 45 minute blocks. It's the cost of shifting the things you care most about entirely.<p>Most managers fail to ever make that shift. Even if they manage to hold themselves back from coding (not all do), their heads remain in the code. One sign is when, in response to impossible expectations from above, they try to come up with technical solutions (e.g., if only we redesigned this module we could meet these impossible deadlines). If your mind is focused on tech, it's the tool you use to solve every problem. Another example is when team members have no idea how to move their careers forward and don't know expectations. A tech focused lead won't be thinking about how a new project is actually the perfect challenge for a more junior employee; their head will be figuring out the best way to solve the task technically.<p>An EM is not a tech lead. It's not just a different skillset, but a mindset change.
What is mindfulness (smrti)? It is non-forgetting by the mind (cetas) with regard to the object experienced. Its function is non-distraction.<p>- Asanga, from Abhidharmasamuccaya
I think this is a nice article. Particularly the thing about "only working on one thing" - I often see teams having to juggle ten different projects at once due to management. This just means that you do none of them particularly well.
the article does mention "TIMEBOX BULLSHIT"; anyone has had success with that, or has tips for the same? the reason I'm asking is, I've tried in the past at the cost of not looking at "bullshit", but it just keeps getting piled up to a point where people start making mountains out of molehills.