
Attention is your scarcest resource - adambyrtek
https://www.benkuhn.net/attention/
======
greggman3
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.

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.

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.

~~~
mjrbrennan
I work at Discourse; there is new functionality coming in the 2.6 release to
address this issue, see [https://meta.discourse.org/t/let-experienced-users-
skip-new-...](https://meta.discourse.org/t/let-experienced-users-skip-new-to-
discourse-features/63137/37). When you join a new community you will be able
to click an option that skips all of the Discobot tutorial and the new user
badge notifications (which are the basic ones like First Like).

~~~
greggman3
This is great! Can I opt out of all badges or only "basic ones".

Of course it will be a decade before everyone updates to a version that
supports this option and allows the user to enable it. In the meantime we'll
have our time and attention wasted for years (T_T)

There's another, automatically getting spammed with emails and then having to
manually opt-out. I get you want it to be frictionless but when signing up a
opt-in checkbox for email would respect my time and scarce attention than
opting me into daily emails and forced me to later opt-out.

And sorry to pick on Discourse. There's tons of other offenders but Discourse
is one most people on HN have experience with. Steam/Xbox/Playstation all have
the same issue. Wasted time and attention required for things I don't care
about. The worst is the OS popping up achievement notifications right over the
climax of some scene. That others care is fine. Just let me turn them off
because "Attention is your scarcest resource".

~~~
meshaneian
@greggman3 Congratulations on your new Discourse badge "Differentiator" for
replying to a feature request with a new feature request. Disclaimer: Not a
real badge, and I don't use Discourse. Sounds like the developers are very
responsive, and it's probably a good tool, this was just easy and fun.

~~~
roflc0ptic
What is particularly nice about hacker news is that this comment didn’t
actually generate a notification. OP has to actively decide “I want to look at
that conversation again”, and then navigate to it.

~~~
mjrbrennan
It’s actually quite nice, I only remembered I posted this comment just now and
I came back and saw it had some upvotes and extra comments which was a nice
surprise.

------
burlesona
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.

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.

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.

~~~
whirlaway
I'm currently a 60% programmer, 40% manager, and can confirm that I am doing a
terrible job as both a manager and as a programmer right now. I'm managing
four people, three of whom have been hired in the past year. I get lots of
complaints about tasks not being clear enough for them and not spending enough
time on code review. But I'm also far, far behind on a major project where I
have to do the majority of the programming. What I thought would be a simple
task I could finish in a month has turned into a death march from all of the
interruptions; weekends and holidays like this one are the only time I can get
work done.

I figure it's only a matter of time before I'm let go. Five years of equity
down the drain, but I've already tried to fix the situation and upper
management just doesn't care. The new CTO doesn't know me well enough to care
about the past, when times were good.

~~~
higeorge13
You need to delegate tasks, it's part of your job. Train the new hires, add
them to your project and let them do the majority of the work. And you
shouldn't work on weekends and holidays.

~~~
khalilravanna
This so many times. This has been my journey to becoming a competent manager
in the past year. What’s helped is framing it as: if I was someone’s manager
after a year have they grown more or less than if I wasn’t there. We grow
through being challenged and trying on new responsibilities. Delegating
running meetings, scoping larger amounts of work, giving presentations—
whatever. If you do all these things yourself you’re both making more work for
yourself and keeping growth opportunities from your reports. The positive
feedback loop is your team gets more done AND when you see someone go from
struggling to crushing it at something _you_ used to do it’s incredibly
rewarding.

Another lesson hard learned was realizing it’s not my job to do everything
like an IC. And especially not my job to personally fix all people problems.
I’m merely just here to guide and coax along the right path. And give lots of
specific feedback on what’s good and what’s not so good.

A hope maybe this helps the grandparent poster. Your post resonates heavily
with where I was at a year or two ago. Being a manager ain’t easy. I’d argue
much more so if you were a really strong IC.

~~~
whirlaway
I wish that this helped. But my job title is programmer, and managing the 5
other people is just a side task. And there's so much work that the team is
always split on several different projects. So in theory delegation sounds
like a good idea, but I don't have spare capacity to delegate to. Nor do I
have control of which projects we prioritize, those are coming from the CEO
and CTO, and head of product -- one major project each.

I've known since university I'm bad at delegating things. Do I just have to
learn by doing it?

Finally, what do you mean by IC? I'm pretty sure I'm not an integrated
circuit, but I've never gotten the head X-ray to check for sure.

~~~
khalilravanna
Personally I think I would write down your first paragraph or something
similar to it and have a conversation with your manager using that as your
guide. I’d be looking for clarity on what your priorities and responsibilities
really are. E.g. does managing come first or programming? And if push comes to
shove is one ok to drop for the other?

Another topic might be communicating the lack of bandwidth for the work. Maybe
there’s scope creep or too much work on the plate and some needs to be
dropped.

As far as learning delegation, yeah, that’s how I did it: trial and error. For
me finding really competent people who I trust and who _want_ opportunities to
grow and take on new responsibilities has helped a lot as a kind of
prerequisite.

And yeah sorry IC = Individual Contributor, i.e. not managing anyone.

------
bilater
'Attention is your scarcest resource'

 _Clicks on link_

~~~
koheripbal
This is why I designate the period between 8-8:30 to read all the
news/socialmedia/etc for the entire day.

You have to time-limit distractions.

~~~
gauchojs
In the morning?

------
hinkley
My most plausible scenario for the Singularity now is someone figuring out how
to augment short term memory with implants.

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.

~~~
kanzure
Interesting concept. One of my favorite mutations in humans is a single
nucleotide flip that confers 19% improvement in working memory capacity.
Substantially underrated. Would only work on embryos, of course.

~~~
AlexCoventry
Which nucleotide site is that?

~~~
kanzure
It's on my list: [https://diyhpl.us/wiki/genetic-
modifications/](https://diyhpl.us/wiki/genetic-modifications/)

rs17070145 in KIBRA/WWC1

~~~
AlexCoventry
From a 2006 GWAS on 351 subjects? I would give 100-to-1 against this panning
out as a causal association.

Also, this was done with very low-resolution genotyping. Even if it's a
genuine association, rs17070145 is probably not the causal variant, just
something which is in linkage disequilibrium with it.

------
sova
"everything is downstream from controlling attention" \- Joscha Bach on the
Lex AI podcast
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2P3MSZrBM&t=3s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2P3MSZrBM&t=3s)

~~~
biddit
That’s an amazing observation. Can you point to roughly where in the video he
says this? Thanks!

~~~
heed
It's about here (2:03:40):
[https://youtu.be/P-2P3MSZrBM?t=7420](https://youtu.be/P-2P3MSZrBM?t=7420)

------
aliceryhl
I'm really curious about the tungsten cube it mentions. Anyone who tried one
got some experiences to share?

~~~
komali2
[https://thume.ca/2019/03/03/my-tungsten-
cube/](https://thume.ca/2019/03/03/my-tungsten-cube/)

Looks like it's just a heavy cube to use as a fidgit toy? I wanna play with it
now too lol.

Edit: I don't know how to link directly to a single amazon review but holy
shit read the one from Richard , it should be the first
[https://www.amazon.com/Tungsten-Cube-1-5-One-
Kilo/dp/B00XZBI...](https://www.amazon.com/Tungsten-Cube-1-5-One-
Kilo/dp/B00XZBIJLS/)

~~~
OakNinja
It’s the best Amazon review I’ve ever read.

“... I have carried the tungsten with me, have grown attached to the downward
pull of its small form, its desire to be one with the floor. This force has
become so normal to me that lifting any other object now feels like lifting
cotton candy, or a fluffy pillow. ...”

------
kirillzubovsky
Opened this in my 64th browser tab.

~~~
kilroy123
I have ~150 open.

~~~
awinter-py
switch to chromium in ubuntu snap -- crashes at ~ 30

------
elxavit0
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."

I hadn't realized that I probably keep way too many "open-loops" in my life.
And they are draining away my attention-currency.

~~~
physicles
Another way to hack around this is to use notes. Before I leave for the day,
and especially for the weekend, I write 4-5 sentences about what I want to
work on next. Makes it easy to put things down after work and easy to pick
them up again. Also, I think it was GTD that said part of the point of having
a next actions list is that it’s on paper and not in your brain.

------
50
From Rebecca Rozelle-Stone's _Simone Weil and Theology_ : "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."

------
unsatchmo
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.

------
graeme
He mentions timeboxing. Does anyone know of a good way to do this on ios with
certain sites?

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?

Eg on mac I have an app, coldturkey, which blocks certain urls during the
workday.

~~~
eloff
I tend to use /etc/hosts to block sites on my desktop, like YouTube or HN.
YouTube DNS itself is somehow special because it stays cached for new browser
windows. So I further cripple it with ublock origin by disabling JavaScript.

I can undo these things easily enough, but it's sufficient that my monkey
brain can't just open a tab and go there without my conscious permission (
which disturbingly is how habit forming these sites are for me.)

I keep them available on my mobile, but I have an old, slow phone and I never
keep it on my desk, I put it out of reach and with notifications on silent.

For things like Facebook and Instagram my solution is simply to delete my
account and never let that abomination steal precious minutes of my life. I
don't miss them at all.

~~~
rement
PSA: /etc/hosts does not work on Firefox unless you turn off the "DNS over
HTTPS" setting [0]. Spent a good hour trying to figure out why Firefox was
ignoring my /etc/hosts file one day.

[0]: [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-dns-over-
https](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-dns-over-https)

~~~
eloff
Thanks for the tip.

------
andrejserafim
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.

Especially because those 3 are unlikely to come back.

~~~
roughly
I found being really clear with myself about the things I was _Not_ going to
take care today was really valuable - it made it much easier to pull my focus
back to what I was working on if I knew the other stuff was “scheduled” for
another day.

~~~
ehnto
Likewise, it's very freeing to completely rid yourself of a task mentally so
that you can focus on the tasks at hand.

Part of it is trusting that future me can get it done properly. A trusting
partner with which to delegate the task to.

------
JimboOmega
(*: For clarity - EM = Engineering Manager, IC = Individual Contributor)

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.

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.

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?

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).

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.

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.

An EM is not a tech lead. It's not just a different skillset, but a mindset
change.

~~~
hu3
What's EM and IC?

~~~
JimboOmega
Engineering Manager / Individual Contributor.

------
einpoklum
Ah, the irony of saying this to people like us, wasting our attention like
there's no tomorrow on the odd news story on HN :-)

~~~
crehn
What is it about HN that makes it feel much more productive than other similar
sites?

~~~
inetsee
The promise of "The Silver Bullet". You'll find an article that will tell you
how to be more creative, more productive, happier. You'll create the next
unicorn business, get filthy, stinking rich, and have everyone wanting to be
your friend.

Of course, your best bet for achieving these goals would be to spend less time
reading HN and more time actually "Doing the Work".

~~~
nullsense
I found a silver bullet here once. Read an article about The DAO and smart
contracts. Led to making 100k.

You're so right though. It is the allure of potentially finding a silver
bullet. Combined with the great community and thoughtful discussions.

------
asimovfan
What is mindfulness (smrti)? It is non-forgetting by the mind (cetas) with
regard to the object experienced. Its function is non-distraction.

\- Asanga, from Abhidharmasamuccaya

------
marvion
> In the short term, this made me less efficient, because I’d spend less time
> programming and more time staring vacantly at the ceiling.

> 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.

As someone with ADHD, thank you for that reminder.

It is an obvious issue that is hard to be aware of.

------
geewee
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.

------
taway738039
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.

~~~
vinceguidry
Time boxing is when you spend X amount of time to either get it done or get it
off your plate. If it’s piling up, then you’re not really time boxing. Push
back on whoever wants you to do it if it’s really bullshit or hand it to a
report or coworker if you still have to do it.

If you can’t do either then you have to treat it like a priority and not
something that can be time boxed.

------
hh3k0
> It took a while for me to train my friends not to instant message me [...]

Ha. I hope said friends are not reading his blog.

~~~
ehnto
I feel like it's the wrong approach anyway. Just keep the instant messages on
silent, and check them when you have some personal time. Training people to
never message you is a good way to lose some of the spontaneity of friendship.

I say that as a massive luddite in this regard, I hate always-on culture. But
I learned you have to make some concessions, because your friends will use
what's convenient to them and the harder you make it the easier you disconnect
them from you. Real friendships aren't built in a day, and you'll be stifling
every relationship you try to build if you don't meet them half-way.

------
aquajet
Attention is all you need

------
chrisweekly
cool blog; author Ben Kuhn founded the Harvard Effective Altruism group, and
wrote an amusing bit about "giving games"... etc

------
binbag
Quick, someone post this article to LinkedIn.

------
ineedasername
I'd say it's time, not attention that is most scarce, but they are highly
correlated so I suppose attention is a reasonable proxy for time.

~~~
hooch
Time cannot be controlled. Attention, however?

