Notes on Attention

20 June 2026

A handful of notes I've been keeping. Unfinished on purpose.

1. Attention is the only truly scarce resource you own. Time is spent whether you attend to it or not; attention is the part you actually get to keep.
2. “Focus” is a misleading word. It sounds like effort — a clenching. The best attention I've felt is closer to the opposite: a relaxation into one thing until the others fall quiet.
3. A tool that respects your attention will tell you the truth and then get out of the way. Most tools do the reverse. The most honest state a screen can be in is off.
4. Boredom is not the enemy of thinking. It's the compost.
5. The question isn't whether a technology is good or bad. It's what it makes easy and what it makes hard — and whether you agree with those choices.
6. You can't multitask attention any more than you can multitask sleep. You can only switch quickly and call it doing two things at once.
7. In Hong Kong, quiet is something you buy: a coffee buys you a table, a ferry ticket buys you twenty minutes. Since you're paying for it, don't spend it scrolling.