Tagged “attention”

Convinced me to start using xfce timer, and it has already been useful!

Seeing more of these GitHub-as-a-blog.

HN thread

and relatable HN thread

surprised I had not considered this - since 2 laptops (work/non-work) has long seemed like a no-brainer.

on fragmented attention span and inability to wait

Can relate to this. Avoiding ads most of the time I find TV ads very jarring

tldr: you probably can’t

Most TV shows are not good. The key problems are that too much quality scripting is required, and that the incentives are to try to get the show extended for another season. Plus too much of the audience “just wants something to watch.”

Could I name twenty TV shows that I think are worth watching, relative to the best movies you haven’t seen and the best books you haven’t read? Not sure. Attention is that which is scarce. But it shouldn’t be. Just pay better attention and read that book or watch that movie. There is also plenty on YouTube that beats TV shows, and if you are old you may not consume much YouTube content at all.

Me either. Logging out of twitter has helped reduce the effect.

This reply spoke to me. I did it a few years ago and it has helped a lot.

I’ve silenced my phone 8 or 9 years ago and it’s been like that since then. (With unmuting it very occasionally. Like a few times a year, maybe.) The notification frequency must have grown a lot since then.

I have no idea how people can deal with their phone beeping and vibrating constantly. Actually, I get annoyed pretty quickly when e.g. my partner leaves her phone in the room.

I liked Uri Bram’s comment on this: “A PDF, but well worth the inconvenience”.

I’ve had my phone on do-not-disturb for most of the last 5 years. It took a few months before I stopped getting phantom vibrations, since then I haven’t experienced that at all. Now it doesn’t ring (ringer volume at 0, ringtone is no sound) and doesn’t vibrate.

If I’m expecting a delivery or something and actually need it to alert me then I will turn on vibrate. But most of the time it sits there silently; if I’m not looking at it I miss calls. Recently for some reason they don’t even pop up so I miss them even if I am looking at it.

Phones are stupidly disruptive. Email is a todo list that anyone can add to; phones are a fire alarm that anyone can pull without consequences.

For an easier transition, using Wind Down on Android auto enables do-not-disturb at night (or whenever you choose). This is helpful if you want notifications back on later and forget to toggle.

I’ve also tried to cut down on computer notifications. For work that is mainly Slack, and for Slack the big 3 things were:

• disable popup notifications
• disable red dots
• use DND (or close it) when not using

And switching screen to grayscale toward the end of the day helps cut out the attention-grabbing hyper-saturated colors of the current web.

I am still not particularly good at staying focused. But minimizing these cuts down on background noise and cuts out a lot of disturbances.

I’ve just switching work laptop to grayscale mode. Done partly to stop apps stealing attention with bright colors, partly to test for accessibility day-to-day. Most difficult thing so far has been viewing diffs; I have to pay more attention to the +/- at the start of the line. Most other stuff has been surprisingly ok. Apps generally look a bit simpler. Video calls feel like watching a movie from the 40s.

For macOS the setting is in System Preferences > Accessibility > Display > Use grayscale

For Android it’s available at night with ‘Digital Wellbeing’ app, but I had problems with that in the past so don’t trust it. Looking for alternative.

On Windows it can be toggled with Ctrl + Win + C (Or search for ‘Color Filter’)