Notes on Attention
A handful of notes I've been keeping. Unfinished on purpose.
- 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.
- "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.
- A tool that respects your attention will tell you the truth and then get out of the way. Most tools do the reverse.
- Boredom is not the enemy of thinking. It's the compost.
- 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.
- You can't multitask attention any more than you can multitask sleep. You can only switch quickly and call it doing two things.