Focus & Attention

Anything and everything related to focus and attention while living in an era characterized by the shortest attention spans

Hrisikesh Medhi

“Attention isn’t free. It’s the most valuable thing you spend.”

Attention Required! | Cloudflare

Hrisikesh Medhi added 5mo

“Clarity isn’t about knowing what you want to do with your life, it’s about knowing what you want to do this week.

You don’t need to have it all figured out. You just need to know your next step.”

James Clear • 3-2-1: How to be great, the power of cold emails, and the dangers of working late

Hrisikesh Medhi added 6mo

Clarity

Her class was also less about consumption and more about conversation. Before arriving, we were responsible for reading 10 pages and writing a 750-word reflection on them. Class always began with small group conversations, in which we discussed the reading from the night before. By ungrouping and regrouping into different groups, we gained differen... See more

David Perell • Against 3X Speed - David Perell

Hrisikesh Medhi added 7mo

Chamath on the importance of slow compounding:

“The faster you build it, that is the half life: it will get destroyed in the same amount of time.”

Things tend to come and go, tip to one side and then the other, tide out and back in, grow and then rot, get created and destroyed, at the same speed.

Hrisikesh Medhi added 7mo

Good writing is meditative writing. It’s a polished and cohesive train of thought, devoid of superfluous babble. If intrusive thoughts make their way into your writing and you neglect to edit them out, your work will suffer. Quality writing does not arise from a stream of consciousness or absent-mindedness. It’s a practice of meditating on a specif... See more

Jen Hitze • Attention, Distraction, and Your Responsibility

Hrisikesh Medhi added 7mo

This inclination towards external stimulus, even if harmful, highlights the reluctance many people have towards quiet introspection. I could only speculate that some of my workaholic acquaintances fall into the same category as those who would prefer self-inflicted discomfort over stillness. They continue to shoulder an increasing workload, even wh... See more

Jen Hitze • Attention, Distraction, and Your Responsibility

Hrisikesh Medhi added 7mo

Self-inflicted discomfort over stillness

Philosophers have been worrying about distraction at least since the time of the ancient Greeks, who saw it less as a matter of external interruptions and more as a question of character—a systematic inner failure to use one’s time on what one claimed to value the most. Their reason for treating distraction so seriously was straightforward, and it’... See more

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Hrisikesh Medhi added 7mo

The proper response to this situation, we’re often told today, is to render ourselves indistractible in the face of interruptions: to learn the secrets of “relentless focus”—usually involving meditation, web-blocking apps, expensive noise-canceling headphones, and more meditation—so as to win the attentional struggle once and for all. But this is a... See more

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Hrisikesh Medhi added 7mo

Perhaps that is why so many of us have half-done tasks on our to-do lists and half-read books on our bedside tables, scroll through Instagram while simultaneously semi-watching Netflix, and swipe between apps and tabs endlessly, from when we first open our eyes until we finally fall asleep. One uncomfortable explanation for why so many aspects of m

Casey Cep • What Monks Can Teach Us About Paying Attention

Hrisikesh Medhi added 7mo

It’s almost like boredom doesn’t exist, like difficulty doesn’t exist, scarcity doesn’t exist. And a feeling I’ve been having a lot lately is that scarcity is often what creates meaning. When you’re surrounded by infinite possibilities, when you know around the next corner is another video that might be funnier, you’re never going to sit with the t

Hrisikesh Medhi added 7mo