I am in the tenth month of my year-long foundation project. The topic of this month is the focus. I’ll share some personal updates in the next post, but now I want to share some of the gains from this month’s reading.
If you are interested, here are the first nine months of reading:
- healthy
- productivity
- money
- food
- read
- Outreach
- sleep
- reflection
- connect
3-minute summary of what I learned
The point is the ability to guide your attention according to intentions. This happens in minutes and seconds, as you focus on the task and ignore years and decades when you think about how to use a limited time on Earth.
In the shortest time frame, we focus on competition between top-down and bottom-up effects. Bottom-up circuits include interruptions in our sensory environment (you hear pings on your phone) and internal impulses (wondering if there is something interesting on your phone). It is more primitive and powerful than the focus guided by our top-down goal.
Researchers have identified the prefrontal cortex (PFC) as a major contributor to this top-down control of attention. If PFC is damaged, for example in patients with frontal lobe venting, the result is impulsive and lack of self-control. The disruption in these networks is also considered to be the basis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).1
This neural circuit is late and does not fully mature until adulthood, as any teenager’s parents can prove it. It is also susceptible to early degradation in adults, which makes older people more likely to be distracted than younger peers.
A broader focus may be more important in your life. We often fail to struggle with mortality, but instead consider how to use limited time to consider clear tradeoffs. Finally, we should worry less about wasting time and hours, rather than wasting years.
Here are the most popular science books I’ve read about our attention and why it’s currently in danger.
Humans have the incredible ability to set and plan goals. What we lack is strong cognitive control that can make us focus on these goals, the author believes. Therefore, we are very susceptible to environmental disturbances and internal impulses that interrupt our tasks.
Animal foraging provides a useful analogy to human information collection. A squirrel decides whether to stay in the tree, both the nuts it may remain, the nuts it may be available in the other tree, and the distance it must climb to reach that tree.
The author believes that new technologies have greatly reduced the “distance” that people must travel between sources of information. This is an escalation coupled with boredom and anxiety that makes us lose interest in the current task faster, hoping to find the next information acorn in the digital forest.
Newport believes that the focus is becoming more valuable, just as it is becoming more rare. As a result, those who can do profound work get a premium in our economy.
With the advent of new technologies, the returns are increasingly attributed to superstars, those who can use smart machines and capital effectively. Going into the first two categories depends heavily on skills, which in turn depends on intentional practice. This requires hard focus and drives people’s need for focus.
At the same time, the supply of focus is getting smaller and smaller. An open office environment, constant email and social media are gradually reducing our attention reserves. As demand increases and supply decreases, this creates economic opportunities for those who can focus on it.
3. Time for Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
How do you find the time? If you are like most people, you won’t. Life is an endless flow of interruptions and homework. Endless busyness means anything without screaming is ignored.
Knapp and Zeratsky don’t offer suggestions for pruning your to-do list or getting more done. Indeed, completing more things can even be a trap because new things magically arrive at their place. Instead, they think the key is to pick something and spend time consistently. Squeeze out the noise and give yourself time to do things you care about. I especially like their advice on “Daily Highlights”, which is the key tasks or projects you want to improve on the next day. I ended up using it for this month’s Keystone habit because it manages to effectively convey the value of focus without succumbing to the convenient rebuttal that you can only focus on just one thing today. Life is always chaotic and busy. But we should still take time at least one thing.
Imagine a disease that affects children and destroys their learning, socializing and family life. It is almost entirely inherited due to more than 80% of the diagnostic differences in genes (same as human-caused height). Parenting and psychotherapy are almost useless. However, there is a treatment for this disease. Given the right medication, children perform much better at school with friends and at home. The drug is well tolerated and has minimal side effects.
How do you treat the feelings of those kids with the drugs we know?
Essentially, this is a picture drawn by Russel Barkley, one of the world’s most important ADHD researchers. He believes ADHD can be devastating for families, and those who have struggled throughout their lives will only have lower results in adulthood. He believes that the causes are largely genetic and biological (although prenatal factors such as viral exposure during pregnancy may also be contributing). He believes that contrary to the promise of parents’ failure in counseling and psychotherapy, the medication here actually does work.
I found this textbook fascinating because it is one of the most obvious cases in a book with a clear worldview and thus goes against my general intuition, perhaps as shown in the recent Nytimes article, that ADHD can be overdiagnosed and overdiagnosed (especially for children).
In fact, I found that Barkley’s position contradicted the general sentiment I heard from non-experts, and I kept asking Chatgpt/Deepresearch to try to poke holes in various claims. However, Barkley’s position was mostly unscathed. There may be overdiagnosis/overdiagnosis at the edge, but for clear cases of ADHD, the biological properties of the disease and the benefits of drug treatment seem to be close to expert consensus.
I think this experience reaffirms my belief in the value of reading textbooks (unpopular truths are not good popular nonfictions) and is generally the value of default, overall.
The average life span of humans is about four thousand weeks. What should you do at that time?
Berkman didn’t answer this question completely, but he did come up with something you shouldn’t do. One is that you shouldn’t expect one day you can “get everything done”. This won’t happen and free yourself from the expectation that you will be liberated.
Another expectation to be released is that perfect life is completely unrestrained. What is the limitation in life (due to being integrated into community and social relations) that makes life have profound meaning.
Burkeman is concerned about the instrumentalization of all life moments. I love his description of Rod Stewart’s model train obsession – so uncomfortable that for Burkeman’s reason, the popular superstar has to do a lot like this. Needs that need to be impressed, perhaps this pursuit is actually more essentially valuable.
This book from Berkman’s idea Four thousand weeks And consider them as daily, large reflections for a month. Previous useful companion book.
7. Robert E. Goodin
Over the years, I have interacted with some kind of ambitious young man. This guy has some projects they’re eager to start right away – they want to learn German, programming, kite surfing and Jiu Jitsu.
My advice to this person is usually to choose one of these things and deal with them temporarily. Although multiple projects are easy to maintain as long as you don’t work hard, the real perseverance required to make progress often requires concentration.
Sadly, this never seemed to be the advice they wanted to hear.
I thought of this story when I considered Goodin’s interesting discussion about the meaning of solution. Settlement involves temporarily putting other options on hold in pursuit of one. Although we tend to see it as an objection to efforts, Gooding believes that both are necessary supplements because in order to work, we must address an object of effort.
The focus, ultimately all efforts, requires the ability to say “this is good enough” and maintain your attention.
Although most of my reading this month has focused on focusing on the focus, I also want to explore the idea of the focus to make sense. Ultimately, we will eventually evaluate our lives, not how many minutes we spend or waste, but to the teenagers who pursue contact with each other that we do or do not cherish.
Ware has worked in palliative care for many years and she retells her client’s story at the end of her life. She suggests that five regrets are particularly common:
- I wish I had the courage to live my own life, not what others expected of me.
- I wish I didn’t work that hard.
- I wish I had the courage to express my feelings.
- I wish I stay in touch with my friends.
- I wish I made myself happier.
Interestingly, regrets focus on relationships, especially on maintaining bonds and authenticity rather than achievement.
So, ironically, when emphasizing the “productive” activities that lead to achievement, we may end up overlooking all aspects of life that we will eventually truly cherish.
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PS – If you want to put some of these ideas into practice, consider joining Cal Newport and my 3-month long course – a life of focus. We will be open at a new conference that will begin next Monday. Once the course begins, we will work to improve three different focus: practice deep work, eliminate digital distractions, and finally, apply focus by engaging in meaningful projects within the new recycling time. If it sounds interesting, make sure to join the waiting list by clicking here and we will post a post to you.
footnote
- Additionally, some theories suggest that ADHD is better seen as a motivational disorder, impairment of the basal ganglia and dopaminergic system.
