Tagged “focus”

have fewer projects, pssht

focus-keeping app

in classic HN style the first comment was “write free software to prevent authoritarian regimes”.

Solid first comment, too

On an emotional level, I think it’s better to start from a place of (unconditional!) self-love, and go from there, rather than beating yourself up because you’re not meeting some blogger’s expectations of how you should act.

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

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

HN thread

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.