Focus & Attention

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

It’s widely believed that 90-95% of the thoughts people experience are repeated thoughts from the previous day. And many of those repeated thoughts are unhealthy ones. I believe this repetition occurs when we become unaware of our attention’s whereabouts. When left unchecked, our attention gravitates towards the dark place in our mind where bad tho... See more

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

Our entire existence is shaped by the orientation of our attention. Each day unfolds as a culmination of the things we choose to focus on from when we wake up until we fall asleep.

We’ve all heard the saying about an idle mind, but its true meaning often eludes us. An idle mind is not necessarily indicative of an empty calendar or a lack of to-dos. An idle mind is one that is unaware of its attention’s whereabouts and is incapable of redirecting it

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