This is a topic I'm somewhat obsessed over. I think it's a real problem these days, we are bombarded with things competing to make us into short-attention-spanned dopamine addicts and it screws up our lives badly. The Matthew Crawford books "The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction" and "Shopcraft as Soulcraft" are super interesting reads on this topic.<p>I'm biased, being a musician, but my experience and many of my colleagues is that musicians are often excellent coders, and I credit this to the fact that you <i>need</i> to master your attention to become a good musician. There is no other way than getting good at putting yourself alone in a room with no distractions and practicing in a focused manner. I remember when I hired a friend of mine (pro bass player) as a junior coder and it was so obvious watching him learn.<p>Personally my top tips for getting better at attention management would be:<p>- Take up an instrument or some other hobby involving regular, quiet, uninterrupted, solo deliberate practice. Do it daily. It becomes your rinse cycle.<p>- Adopt the pomorodoro or other similar technique of doing 20-30 minutes of completely focused, uninterrupted work at a time and then taking a <i>real</i> break for a few minutes. This is both how I work and practice.<p>- Read a lot, on paper.<p>- Run - IMHO way better than lifting for overall mental effects and mental focus<p>- Get enough sleep, religiously<p>my two cents Canadian. :-)
Bell[1] ran a study to find out what the most productive engineers did differently from their peers. The answer was communication. They did a lot more of it. They bounced ideas with co-workers, they validated solutions with customers, they did their own research, and so on.<p>While I have no doubt attention is important (much like a luck stat, it affects everything you do), it might be a bit premature to declare it the most valuable asset without additional evidence than personal anecdote!<p>[1]: Or some other phone giant -- I keep misplacing this citation so if someone knows what I'm talking about please hand me a reference.
I’ve also realized lately that just being able to maintain my focus (and quiet the anxiety that causes context switching) would be a bigger productivity boost than any methodology, tool, or programming language. It’s worth more than 10 years more experience. I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD in the past, so it’s always been a struggle. What’s the secret? Meditation? Drugs?
I would argue that attention is the most valuable asset for productivity in every case, period. I guess I sort of thought this went without saying.<p>The details in this article are great, I'm a productivity geek despite never really getting to a point where I "always feel productive" - and each point here is definitely relevant specifically for focus as a software developer. I'm a manager so minimizing meetings is out of the question to some degree, but my "OS minimalism" is much more extreme so maybe that balances out.<p>Ultimately this article is great from the POV of a software dev, but the point of it applies to everything in life.
Much truth to these tactics for maximizing attention, esp exercise. Not mentioned is the #1 attention killer in my experience: working on boring tasks.<p>I’ve found productivity maximized when I make time to work on an interesting project every day or two. Making progress on enjoyable tasks gets me started with the momentum to tackle the nasty, boring ones.<p>My conclusion is ironic in that I’m the CEO of Amplenote, a note taking/todo list app built to ensure “urgent” or “important” tasks get scheduled to the calendar. I consider myself more disciplined than the average bear, but I’ll be damned if I can focus my attention for more than half the day on tedious tasks.<p>Meanwhile, when running down a feature or bug fix that will directly help me as a user, I can often focus for 12 hours of programming. I think dogfooding is central to the best products because it begets genuine interest, thus attention, from its developer/users.
Ex-professional weightlifter of about 10 years here, checking in to add a note.
The whole section on physical health and deadlifting is borderline redundant.<p>Don't get me wrong... It's an alpha exercise and you feel amazing doing it. But the only physical reward you get from deadlifting is the ability to deadlift more and alongside it have a severely higher risk of injury.<p>If you want a correlation between sitting at a desk and building strength to offset that, look at squats in all it's forms, and hamstring and quad dominant exercises. Your lower body is in much more trouble than your lower back from sitting at a computer.<p>Hipflexer stretches with resistance bands will also do you wonders.<p>Trust me folks. Doing deadlifts because you see the gym-bros on youtube doing them is a big mistake. Take a book out of Eddie Hall's playbook who says the exact same thing... And he's literally the strongest man in the world.
I recommend the book "Deep Work" by Cal Newport. It makes a very compelling case about why the ability to concentrate during long periods of time is critical to create meaningful work, and it gives more detailed (and better) advice than this post
I find productivity is a false metric to measure yourself against. The most productive person is the person who writes the most code / features, but usually the most important people don't write code, they help others, whether that's understanding problems or giving direction.<p>I still agree with the title, I give my attention to as much as I can handle, and no more. I have (restricted) notifications turned on, I try have interesting things around me, I tackle as many problems as reasonable at the same time, but slowly because I find the best solutions are where I've had a while to think about while in the shower for example, and how they interact with other problems.<p>PS: if you're trying to learn something, disregard everything I said, focus is so important when learning
Attention is extremely important but other things are too like knowing the language and libraries you use and knowing the domain and design patterns that are useful in your domain.<p>What I found to my surprise is that to increase my attention, noise-cancelling headphones are extremely helpful, even when I'm working with no other people around me.
“My high-level workflow looks something like this: identify the problem to solve; think on the problem and let ideas percolate; research, discuss, and experiment with these ideas; implement and test the solution; deliver and maintain the solution.”<p>I find talking to people really helpful in pinning down the first step: defining the problem.
I understand the frustration with badly asked questions, but not sure I’d want to work with someone who views conversations with coworkers as “offering little value”
Attention is our most valuable asset as human beings in general. What we put our attention on, is what becomes our life experience and our memories.<p>In many religions/practices, a very big part of the path to enlightenment is to "take back control" of your attention, so you can consciously direct it to "what matters".
I would like to add some different advice to what I just read here. I meditate and in addition to helping me know my connectedness to the universe, all people, and nature here on earth, meditation is exercise to improve the ability to concentrate on work, art, cooking, really listening to people, etc. In my experience meditation == super power.<p>I also believe that what we eat strongly affects our lives. For myself, I avoid processed foods. I simply suggest paying attention to what you eat and how you feel, and act accordingly.<p>I also think that taking many short work breaks during the day helps productivity, especially if you are stuck on something. I live a 90 second walk from a trailhead leading to national forest land. Amazing how 15 minutes in nature will bust through solving technical problems. Five minute breaks to play ping pong or racket ball on an Oculus Quest is also a good way for me to pause work and sometimes return with new ideas of perspectives.
I have to use Ping ID quite a bit to log into customers' systems. I also live in south Louisiana.<p>The last 5 months have been extremely difficult to maintain focus because, for me at least, it's really difficult for my brain to not check tropical forecasts every time I look at my phone.<p>I've noticed that my productivity triples when there are no storms in the gulf due to the fact that it's much easier to maintain my attention on engineering tasks. I've thought of setting up a second phone that I have with ONLY ping on it, but I feel that it's the stress driving me to check the tropics, and if I took the time to create a 'just ping' device my mind would find another way to compulsively check.
I find the language in this article conflicting. People have a tendency to relay advice on what has worked best for them; with little regard for whether or not it will work best for others.<p>On one hand the auther uses a lot of "my" language to convey what works best for him. That's great and I am happy to read what works best for others, but what makes it a bit short-sighted is the shift in language from:<p>>The more attention I can devote, the more cycles I can complete, and the more productive I am.<p>to:<p>>Make your place of work boring and tidy.<p>>Make your smart phone dumb.<p>>Be an OS minimalist.<p>etc.<p>This shift from "here's what works best for me" to "here's what will work best for you" is quite imposing and presumptuous.
I totally agree - Deleted Facebook and Twitter, dumbed down my phone and keep it out of sight for these reasons. Also, the more you can bundle into Emacs, the faster you go.
This is part of why I prefer text messages over phone calls, but for the very few exceptions when a phone call is more efficient or required. (Ie when multiple steps / detailed interaction is needed). With phone calls, I specifically don’t like how I have to immediately stop what I’m working on and focus my attention upon answering the call, as opposed to a text message where almost nothing is lost if I wait 60 seconds before looking at it.<p>I’m still surprised that many find this offensive when I make this request of them; or when they disregard my request and I’m forced to ignore their calls until they text.<p>I have one client who would called me anywhere from 1 to 10+ times a day with small tasks I needed to do , which were much more efficiently communicated over text. (Things such as “check access point of unit 302 of the Westside building , user can’t connect”). The phone calls would never be less than five minutes in length, each, and of mostly small talk and other irrelevant info to the original purpose of the call. I strongly considered stopping work for this client, but for the fact that I so much enjoyed the work he brought me. This work was all remote/from behind my computer (not onsite work).
I have found that an Apple Watch or an android equivalent makes a good dumb smartphone, and regularly leave my phone far away or at home if I need to focus.
I like the author touch on physical activity. Whether it's deadlift or not, it's not important. What's important is being active. Your brain just works better after good work out. Try it, stick to a good workout plan for a week and you'll notice the difference.
I've recently started using VS Code and my favorite feature by far is Zen Mode. It allows me to focus a lot more, takes away a lot of the distractions I get from my million open browser tabs and other apps trying to get my attention.
Over the last 100 years, humans' lifespan has only increased by ~5 years, if you lived to be a teenager.<p>Think of all the 'productivity' we've had in the past 100 years, that's +5 years when you're already old and finished.<p>Great. Can we do the math on how we've nearly blown ourselves up many times over, are destroying the environment, working 40+ hours/week and so on?<p>Worth it for everyone to be 'productive' for a collective increase of 1 or 2 years within your lifetime, assuming we don't destroy the planet or blow ourselves up?<p>You decide, keep your productivity if you wish, I'm going for a walk and enjoying my life :)
I use the pomodoro technique not just because it actually helps me get started—the best way I've found, for me, to combat procrastination—and get things done, but also to combat the sitting problem he mentions. Standing up and walking around the house for five minutes periodically helps me at least stretch my legs.<p>That aside, I find pretty much all of his advice pretty useful and a lot of it I already at least try to follow. Good to know it doesn't work just for me.
Protip:<p>On OS X you can set it so no icons appear on your Desktop.<p>For me at least, having that "new laptop" clean slate at all times helps me maintain focus :)
I did two things once it became clear that working for home was going to drag on for months:<p>- bought a really good office chair. Herman Miller Aeron. Incredibly expensive but also no regrets at all. I sit in this thing for 10+ hours a day with zero issues.<p>- bought a pull-up bar. Great for either an exercise regime, or just for something to do when you're pondering a work related issue.
One thing I've discovered is that I can't sit in front of the computer and write code all day. Actually scheduling time for meetings and talking with people seems like a distraction but realistically I can only code up to 4 hours a day anyway so no point avoiding users/teammates/bosses thinking you'd be more productive coding.
Attending to competing priorities is a nightmare. They do more distraction if we do not prioritize further (finer grain) on already prioritized items. Mostly somewhat related to this is the context switch. Not only we need finer prioritization, but also grouping them to minimize context switch.
Doesn’t this regiment render the subject rather dull? Trapped in a loop with little in the way of new inspiration this sounds like the life of a drone not a man.
TL;DR - The older I get and experiment the more I realised:<p>a "BALANCED" approach(philosophy) is the best in all things health. For long term vitality(fitness-function). Ignore short-term gains (fitness function) from "extreme views" or choices - they either don't last or is not sustainable.<p>I see a lot of anecdotes and recommendations for health and exercise regime etc. Allow me to cite my own experience and armchair-opinions.<p>I'm in no way an expert or special(physiology) - although my mom thinks I'm super !<p>I think many of the HN community can relate to my experience.<p>I'm 38 male generally healthy (minus some sport/exercise injuries). CompSci and BioChem background+education<p>I'm sort of an extremest in all things and especially health ! This include taking a "somewhat" extreme view (and implementation) where I will usually for a few months focus on one thing exclusively as the new gospel.<p>This Includes The following:<p>-Supplementation(vitamins,fish/krill oils, minerals, timing,brands, protocols etc)<p>-Diets(all sorts)
--keto
--elimination,
--lowcarb,high-card
--Paleo
--Carnivore
--Vegetarian(this one really sucked for me)<p>-Diet Regimes
--Fasting
--OMAD
--Juicing
--monotone (eat the same meals most days)<p>-Nootropics(What a rabbit-hole ! - Too many to list)<p>-Exercise
--P90x
--Crossfit
--Cardio
--Strength
--kettle bells
--BodyCombat(like Tae Bo but with better music and prettier girls)
--Hiking<p>-Life
--Mediation
--Relationships
--Business
--Sleep<p>Most of the items on the list had some sort of short-term benefit, but it either didn't last or was really not sustainable.<p>a Balanced approach to diet(a little of everything that is considered not terrible, meat,fish,veggies,chocolate,carbs etc)<p>a Balanced approach to exercise ( strength + cardio + Lots of REST) I can't stress rest enough. I went from working out 5 days a week, to 3 days a week and I feel better !<p>Less injuries, my two big health issues and 5 operations over a decade was because of exercise injuries. Maybe I'm just getting older or my DNA is not correct for too many physiology stresses. Or hell maybe I'm just doing all the exercises wrong !? (I don't think I am though)<p>YMMV :)
> My office is a spare bedroom. The walls are blank. There’s no tv. There’s a desk, chair, laptop, laptop stand, keyboard, mouse, and mouse pad.<p>No no no. This is terrible for your self-esteem over a long period. I understand being in a tidy workspace but having things bare is demoralising.<p>Funishings have their place in any office. I have some nice art on the wall and I have a hifi setup with podcasts / music on.
Mihaly Csikszentmihályi and others began researching flow after Csikszentmihályi became fascinated by artists who would essentially get lost in their work. Artists, especially painters, got so immersed in their work that they would disregard their need for food, water and even sleep. The theory of flow came about when Csikszentmihályi tried to understand the phenomenon experienced by these artists. Flow research became prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s, with Csikszentmihályi and his colleagues in Italy still at the forefront. Researchers interested in optimal experiences and emphasizing positive experiences, especially in places such as schools and the business world, also began studying the theory of flow at this time.[2]<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)</a>
The article is pretty accurate, based on my experience of writing almost 1 million LOC over the decades.<p>Build physical strength. The damage done by sitting 8+ hours a day is underrated. - Right, also being folded up in a sitting position affects your organs (chi). Certainly go for a walk for at least a mile per day. Deadlifts, dunno about that specifically.<p>Make your place of work boring and tidy. - Yes, I use a dedicated desk with almost no clutter.<p>Make your smart phone dumb. - I use a Blackberry 8700g which has no current apps, so no distractions. 2 week standby battery.<p>Be an OS minimalist. - NA.<p>Other - I should use more terminal windows to have different apps open at the same time (editor, SQL client, etc.) but I usually don't.