Attention & Peace

I was having a conversation recently with a close family member, where she brought up a special subject. She met a man that didn’t have a mobile phone, which is a crazy concept in 2024. But one that fascinates me. It’s been a few days since we had this conversation, but this is something that hasn’t left my mind since. No mobile phone… I can only Imagine the peace of living such a life.

Which is why I’m writing this article, to explore the idea and look at some advice that @LukasHozda provides in his article. It impacted me to the point that I just had sit down and let the ideas simmer for a couple minutes. I reflected on them for a little while until I felt like I had to write something of my own, to consolidate it all. Because a lot of the advice he presents are things I’d already implemented in the past, even though I’ve lost those habits in the past few years. That’s what hooked me onto the article, and I’m glad it did!

You do not have to be available 24/7

The reason the man with no mobile phone (let’s call him Carl) popped back up in my mind is because the article mentions a similar concept. His reasoning for not having a mobile phone is that whenever he’s not home it means he’s not available, he’s doing something. Therefore there is no point in contacting him because he’s busy. This makes total sense because what’s the point of having constant notifications, messages & calls if you’re already occupied with something else?

Unless it’s an emergency, you can’t free yourself to “help out with something” or “have a quick chat”. You are busy. If you’re a serious person it’s higly probable that you follow a schedule, having people constantly trying to knock you off that path by virtually summoning you, is annoying. Not only do you get off schedule by letting yourself be consumed by those invitations, but it also drains your mental energy. A quote that perfectly summarizes this (although moreso in an information gathering context) is the following:

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
― Herbert Simon

I’m sure that you can imagine the benefits of Carl’s method are immeasurable, first of all they lend themselves well to a life that is carefully planned. Since you are never bothered while carrying out the tasks on your schedule, people need to make plans with you at least one day in advance & you have segmented time for work and leisure! With this, you shift most of the responsibility of having a productive day to yourself. Which is something that should overjoy you, and if it doesn’t, you’re slacking and have lots of work to do, figure out how to fix that situation and follow the advice in this article.

@LukasHozda’s advice ties in well with this, because he recommends always being on do not disturb during your periods of work. I quote this directly from the article:

The 24/7 nature of digital communication creates social pressure to be constantly available. This prevents the deep rest and boredom necessary for attention restoration.

This is beautifully put. But what really caught my eye is the last sentence. It made me ask: ”Do we need deep rest and boredom to restore attention?” The deep rest part is obvious, but the claim about boredom intrigued me. As it’s something I’d already heard in passing, I decided to keep it in mind to research later.

I quickly realized I didn’t need the research. Because right after reading the article, I just took the time to sit there and let the information simmer. And once I came back to the computer I could feel a certain clarity that wasn’t there before. A certain ease handling ideas, and feeling fully in control of what I thought and how I was gonna act about it. That’s enough proof for me that boredom and idleness are perfectly fine ways to restore attention and mental energy.

Draining mental energy & attention

Most of us feel perfectly refreshed and full of energy after a good night’s rest, and lose that throughout the day up until we’re tired and ready to go to bed. We often think of this in terms of physically being tired and ready to rest. But the same can be said for our brains as well, which should gradually lose energy as the day goes on. As you can imagine that’s not the case, because most of us are not using our brain in sensible ways. We expose it to multitasking (context switching), brainrot and constant decision making (by lack of proper planning). This basically drains our mental energy as soon as we wake up, and then we go on with heavy brain fog and no real time to restore all the energy we’ve lost in the morning.

Routine

A simple way to minimize the amount of daily decisions you have to make, is to have some sort of routine. I think it’s pretty obvious that someone with a schedule who only has to wake up - perform their prepared tasks - go to sleep, will conserve much more energy and attention than someone who constantly has to think, what next? By limiting the number of decisions you have to make, you not only save energy but you can also decide to allocate it to more important tasks. See when you start using these techniques you’ll find yourself in a position of attention management, as opposed to being a slave to your impulses. Which is why we should choose to schedule regular breaks for instance, since they’ll restore your energy throughout the day.

Breaks

During breaks you can choose to totally reset and disengage from everything related to the task you’re taking a break from, or take the time to do something that relaxes you. They should restore energy and attention, not drain it further. That’s why things like social media brainrot are no good, some think that it’s a good way to pass time but it really doesn’t bring anything valuable to your life. It doesn’t matter if you find a funny meme or video, none of those moments bring you anything, they’re not memorable and they leave you without restoring any energy or attention.

A more sensible way to spend that time, if you decide to relax with an activity as opposed to sitting or walking with an idle mind, would be to choose an activity that you enjoy. Depending on what your environment allows, you should do something that you like. If you’re a reader carrying a book around is easy, bringing it to a workplace is fine. You could jam on your instrument if you’re someone that works from home for example. But this period should really be sacred and not polluted by something that drains your energy further, because an effective break is what will allow you to get back on task and flow faster!

Flow

As hard as it is to get into it sometimes, you can’t reach for a quick distraction to keep you stimulated, that’s only gonna reset that initial focusing period.

Directly quoting from the article:

Studies show that it takes like half an hour (if I recall correctly? Thereabouts) to fully regain focus after an interruption.

He’s not sure about the half hour figure, and neither am I. But I think any person that has ever tried to refocus after context switching can attest to the fact that it’s far from being immediate. Try building the habit of staying on task no matter how boring or difficult it gets. I don’t have all the solutions as I’m still struggling heavily with this one myself, but some concepts I learned recently have been helping me get better, like breaking things down for instance.

Break it down

Whenever I get stuck now I try to convert problems/concepts/ideas from abstract & complex to detailed & simple. I won’t spend too much time on this since I’m probably going to write an article on it later, and you can find glimpses of it already in this one, where I use it to figure out how to make a baud rate generator. But really, the gist of it is to figure out the next step. If you want to make a website, but don’t know how to write html, then your next step should just be to write an <html> tag, figure that out and go from there. Make the next step so easy that it would be ridiculous not to do it.

Space segmentation

Since we’ve talked about what drains our mental energy and our attention, let’s learn how to restore it. I’ve already covered a few ways, so let’s focus on the one that has the biggest impact on me. Which is to segment your work and leisure spots, it could even be extended to segmenting your leisure and “recharging” spots but that might be too much. Whenever I lock in on productivity, I find myself doing this naturally. It creates a trigger for your brain to switch when you enter that room. Ideally you’d remove all distractions from your workspace, no phone in there or at least put it far away so it’s tedious to get to it.

Often it’s not our need to be stimulated that distracts us by itself, but our ease of access to it. Imagine you had to pay 3% of your net worth every time you wanted to grab your phone as a distraction. You’d think about it twice right? That’s why keeping it far away is very effective at preserving your attention. It’s often the case that if you put people in a room where there’s nothing else to do but work, they’d just go do that out of boredom. Our brains crave stimulation, so if work is the only entertainment in town we’ll settle for it!