每天集中注意力都变得越来越难了

我现在正感受到它。我不得不给电脑设置了15分钟的计时器，并屏蔽所有干扰来写这个。如果我不强迫自己专注，我几分钟后就很容易分心。即使我正在做我一直想做的事情，我仍然会有去做其他事情的冲动。

我不知道这是怎么发生的，也不知道什么时候发生的。在过去的几年里，我一直在学习、工作和做开源项目，而且确实完成了不少事情。同时做这些事情需要关注我想做的事情，而忽略噪声。

如今，如果我能有一个小时的专注时间就很幸运。澄清一下，我的目标不是每周工作90小时或做任何疯狂的事情。那对我来说不可能。我只是希望我花在编程、学习或写作上的那一小时只有一个活动。但实际上，我可能花十分钟做某件事，然后就分心了，再试图重新集中注意力。

理想情况下，我希望能够计划长时间工作在某件事情上而不被打扰。之后再上线查看消息和其他事情。

干扰并不是某一个特定的事情。举几个例子：

感觉就像我的大脑会找到方法去做别的事情，从而逃避无聊或艰难工作的痛苦。

这让我想起高中时和朋友聊起躺在床上玩手机能不知不觉耗掉几个小时的情况。那大约是2015年，当时注意力贪婪：https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-totalitarians-of-the-attention-economy-3e239524，那些应用虽然还没很强大，但仍然能吸引一个青少年的心几个小时。我也学会了这些应用应该非常小心地使用。那时我做了一个决定，不让床边有充电器。那时主要是针对我的手机，因为当我在电脑上时，要么在阅读，要么在编程，要么在玩游戏。即使我没有心情思考，我也会玩策略游戏或国际象棋。这些活动能锻炼脑力，也很有趣。所有这些都是有意为之的活动。我在电脑上不做任何被动的活动，比如浏览网页或聊天。

后来我发现了 HackerNoon 和 Medium，这些是我每当在电脑前无聊时首先会浏览的网站。这意味着我有了一种轻松摆脱无聊的方法。它们以前有一些高质量的内容。它们激励我去做一些项目并学习更多的编程知识。我在那里找到了像 CSDojo 这样的频道：https://www.youtube.com/@CSDojo/videos。如今我甚至不再打开它们。上面充斥着劣质或点击诱饵文章，可能是出于盈利动机。然后 Hackernews、YouTube 和其他平台取而代之。我也在过程中认识了一些优秀的人和博客。我学会了保持一个阅读清单：https://r.glyphack.com/s/s，从我喜欢的人那里，当我在公交上时可以阅读。

我慢慢找到了更多应对无聊的活动。这使我更难专注于难的事情。让我保持正轨的是没有出路。我必须解一些代数题。我要求自己对所做的事情有非常高的理解标准。而且我所有的东西都是用 LaTeX 完成的，这样我就不能从别人那里抄袭。我是唯一一个自己打字的人。

我第一次看到有人不付出努力却仍然获得回报是在工作中。你可能会想，大学里的人不是经常作弊和抄作业，并拿到好成绩吗？确实如此，但当你和那个群体中的人交谈时，很明显他对学科一无所知。那时好成绩对我来说没什么意义。作为学生，作弊并不能让你走得很远。

工作中则不同。我的日子大多是在开会和聊天中度过。实际工作和废话之间的比例：https://www.spakhm.com/bullshit-ratio 是不平衡的。我看到一些几乎不干活、只会说话的人非常成功。只要他们把 10% 的注意力放在工作上，在大多数环境中就被视为足够了。之前我做了一个实验：https://glyphack.com/tracking-time/ 来追踪我的时间，结果发现我一周内在 Slack 上闲聊就花了 8 个小时。

我不在意雇主想如何瓦解员工的注意力。但这让我在编程时习惯了分心。我正在尝试弥补这种损害。

下一个重大变化是更多地使用大型语言模型（LLMs）。我发现自己经常处于这样的情况：我把某件事外包给LLM去做，然后我开始做其他事情。而在这期间，我不断思考它在做什么。或者当我在思考某件事时，我会开始和LLM聊天讨论我的想法，而不是去做某件事，我会只停留在研究模式几个小时。

我能够让它去研究某个主题，这很好。但真正的生产力只有在我能够继续做其他事情而不去想它时才会出现。我没有打开任何通知，所以它不会分散我的注意力。但我仍然发现自己在想着我刚刚让它做的事情，我无法专注在其他事情上。

与此同时，如果我花时间与LLM互动，我会觉得很慢。我必须等待它的回复，而且我必须纠正所有的回复。AI最好的使用方式似乎是把它们可以毫无错误完成的事情完全外包出去。

为什么我会一直这样做？大概是因为它容易、快速且高效。如果我意识到自己需要做某件事，我可以写下来以后做，或者我可以直接让LLM去做。问题只有在我同时开始做很多事情时才会显现出来，因为它实际上正在做事情。然后我脑子里会有多件事，无法真正集中注意力。我必须不时检查它并引导它走向正确的方向。

而这令人过度刺激，在某种程度上，没有LLM做某些事情有时很无聊。你看不到那么快的结果，这会让专注更难。

那么我如何才能重新获得专注能力呢？有时我会直播：https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcmQIfYP9cdK291cvDIsllg 我在做的事情，仅仅因为有了摄像头，我无法通过拿起手机来逃避困难的挑战。我过去会通过Discord与朋友一起协作工作。不幸的是，现在已经不可能了，因为伊朗的人们如今无法有稳定的互联网连接。

长期坚持做某件事情非常困难。如果我所做的事情需要好几天才能看到结果，我就没有太多动力去做。与此同时，编写小型实用脚本很有趣，每当我遇到摩擦时，我就会去做它。每当我卡住时，我可以把问题投入其中，并习惯性地等待别人给出答案，而不是自己解决问题。而他们给出结果的速度很快。所以下次我需要阅读论文来理解某个主题时，我会更加不情愿，因为我可以通过他们更快地得到结果。

我正在改变一些习惯，以取代当前的习惯。如果我没有足够的动力去做任何事情，我会起身拿起一本书来看。我在阳台上养了一个花园：/s/garden/，当我疲惫时，我可以翻动土壤，种些盆栽，修剪植物。我发现这比看电影等活动上瘾性要小。当动力回来的时候，我可以轻松停止。

我的目标不是找到这个问题的答案。我想看看发生了什么，以及为什么过去几个月里我没有做任何无关紧要的事情。无论如何，我设定的写作计时器真的很有帮助。我花了更多时间来写这篇文章，但它给了我最初的写作动力。

由 Hugo 提供技术支持：https://gohugo.io/ 和 tomfran/typo：https://github.com/tomfran/typo。书籍封面图片由 Open Library 提供：https://openlibrary.org/。

I’m feeling it right now. I had to set a timer for 15 minute on my computer and block all distractions to write this. If I didn’t force myself to focus I would easily get distracted by something after few minutes. Even when I’m doing things that I’ve been waiting to do it, I still feel the urge to do something else.

I don’t know how and when this happened. During the last few years I was always studying, working, and doing open source. And actually got stuff done. Doing all of those at the same time requires paying attention to what I wanted to do and ignore the noise.

Nowadays, I’m lucky if I get 1 hour of focused time. Just to be clear, my goal is not to work 90 hours a week or anything crazy. That is not possible for me. I just want the hour I spend programming, learning, or writing to be just one activity. But instead I spend 10 minute on something then I get distracted, and try to focus again.

Ideally, I want to be able to plan to work on something for long hours without any distraction. After that time get back online check for messages and other things.

The distractions are not one particular thing. A few examples:

It feels like my brain finds a way to do something else and avoid painful situations like boredom or hard work.

It reminds me of when I was in high school talking to a friend about how laying in bed with your phone can kill hours without you noticing it. It was circa 2015, back then attention hungry：https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-totalitarians-of-the-attention-economy-3e239524 apps were less powerful but still lure a teenager’s mind for few hours. I learned that these apps should be used very carefully. At that time I made a decision to never have a charger near my bed. Back then it was mostly about my phone, because when I was on the computer I was either reading, or programming, or playing a game. Even if I wasn’t in the mood to think, I played a strategic game or chess. These activities exercise the mind and are fun. All of them were an intentional activity. I didn’t do any passive activities like browsing or chatting on my computer.

Later I discovered HackerNoon and Medium, it was the first website that I was browsing whenever I was bored behind the computer. This meant that I had a way to get out boredom easily. It used to have some high quality content. It inspired me to do some projects and learn more programming. I found channels like CSDojo：https://www.youtube.com/@CSDojo/videos there. Nowadays I don’t even open them. They are filled with slop or click bait articles, probably because of monetization incentives. Then hackernews, and YouTube and others took their place. I also found some good people and blogs along the way. I learned to keep a reading list：https://r.glyphack.com/s/s from people I like to read when I’m on the bus.

I slowly found more activities for when I’m bored. This made it harder to focus on hard things for me. What kept me on track was that there was no way out. I had to work out some algebra problems. I kept myself to a very high bar of understanding what I do. And I did everything in LaTeX so I couldn’t copy from someone else. I was the only one typing them.

The first time I saw people not putting the effort and still get the reward for it was at work. You might wonder, aren’t people in the university constantly cheating and copying homework, and get good grades? Well yes, but when you talked with someone in that group it was clear that he is clueless about the subject. A good grade didn’t mean much to me at that time. And as a student cheating does not get you that far.

At work it is different. My days are mostly spend meetings and over chat. The balance between actual work and bullshit：https://www.spakhm.com/bullshit-ratio is skewed. I saw people who were barely doing any work and just talk are successful. As long as people give 10% of their attention to work they are considered fine in most environments. Previously I did an experiment：https://glyphack.com/tracking-time/ to track my time and found out that I spent 8 hours chatting on slack in a week.

I don’t care how employers want to shatter employee’s focus. But this made me get used to distractions when I’m programming. I’m trying to undo this damage.

The next big change is more usage of LLMs. I find myself in this situation too many times, where I outsource something to an LLM and then I start working on something else. And while doing this I keep thinking about what it’s doing. Or when I’m thinking about something I start chatting with an LLM about my idea and instead of getting started on something I’m in research mode only for hours.

It’s good that I’m able to ask something else to research some topic for me. But the productivity only comes if I can move on to something else and not think about it. I don’t have any notifications turned on so it doesn’t distract me. But I still find myself thinking about what I just asked it to do and I cannot focus on something else.

At the same time if I’m spending the time interactively with an LLM I feel slow. I have to wait for the response and I have to correct every response coming out. The best use of AI seems to be outsourcing what they can do end to end without error.

Why do I keep doing this? Presumably because it’s easy and fast, and productive. If I realize I have to do something I can write it down to do it later or I can just ask the LLM to do it. The problem only shows up when I start doing so many things at once because it’s actually doing the thing. Then I have multiple things on my mind and can’t focus really. I have to check on it and guide it in the right direction every now and then.

And this is overstimulating, in a way that doing something without LLM sometimes is boring. You don’t see the results as fast. Which makes focusing harder.

So how can I regain my ability to focus? Sometimes I live stream：https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcmQIfYP9cdK291cvDIsllg what I’m doing just because with a camera I cannot escape from hard challenges by grabbing my phone. I used to co-work with my friends over discord. Unfortunately it’s not possible anymore because people in Iran cannot have a stable internet connection nowadays.

It’s incredibly hard to commit to something for a long period of time. If what I’m doing is going to take multiple days to have a result I have less motivations to do it. Meanwhile, vibe coding small utility scripts is fun I keep doing it whenever I see a friction. Whenever I am stuck I can throw my problem into it and wait strengthen this habit of waiting for an answer from someone as opposed to work through problems. And they are fast in getting back the results. So next time I have to read a paper to understand the subject I will be more reluctant because I can get a faster result through them.

I’m changing some habits to replace the current ones. If I don’t feel motivated enough to do anything I get up and pick up a book to read. I’m keeping a Garden：/s/garden/ in my balcony is that when I’m tired I can move the soil around and plant some pots and prune plants. I find this to be a less addictive than say, watching a movie. When the motivation comes back I can stop it easily.

My goal was not to find an answer for this problem. I wanted to see what’s going on and why I am not doing anything inconsequential in the past few months. Anyway the timer I set to write this really helped. I spent a lot more time to write this but it gave me the initial motivation to write.

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