Consider the following situation.
- You’re trying to do something hard but in-line with your objective function.
- Then your brain is like “oh, let’s take a 5 minute break and check my email”
- Then you’re like ok fine, I’ll do that and then I’ll be more focused afterward. After all, if I don’t do that task my brain suggested I do right now, then the uncompleted task will probably distract me.
- You do said task.
- Your brain incurs high overhead from context-switching. Your brain runs avoid_discomfort.cpp and it is like “oh checking my email gave me more instant rewards, why are you doing hard task that does not provide instant gratification”
- Result: you’re not very productive, you get increasingly distracted, and you feel bad about it.
So, where did it all go wrong? Well, I think there’s an argument to be made for it going wrong at any of 2, 3, or 4. Let’s talking about each of these, what’s going wrong, and how to short circuit it.
There are a couple of flavors of (2). Flavor 2.1: communications (messages, email). Here the thought my brain is emitting is “oh! it’d be bad if you missed a message.” Or maybe it’s like “Remember the last time we checked messages and got a cool messange from a friend? We had some dopamine then, you should try it again!” As far as I understand this type of Pavlovian Conditioning is especially effective (i.e., addictive) because it’s random: you don’t get a reward every time you check your email, so you will learn that you need to check your email even more to get the sporadic rewards.
Flavor 2.2: “news” This is pretty similar. This might look like repeatedly reloading Alek’s blog for new posts, even though he’s not really posting that often. Honestly, I think that’s one thing that’s going to be so great about skyspace3.0: that it’s less of a stream and more of a wikipedia. So the user will be more intentional about finding content.
Flavor 2.3: “random thing you just remembered that feels important to google”
Now, this is pretty subtle, because here’s the thing. Checking skyspace2.0 for new posts by Alek, it’s not fundamentally a bad thing. People reading skyspace2.0 developed substantially deeper relationships with Alek, and there is evidence that this is not simply a correlation but actually has causality. (My basis for this claim is that skyspace2.0 generated a lot of conversations and jokes and so on.) Checking messages sometimes can be good. E.g., it’s generally pretty good for me to check messages before going to a meeting / tutoring appointment etc in case of last minute changes of plan But, the question is not whether e.g., checking Alek’s blog is good, it’s whether it is net good. And, if it’s causing you to fragment your attention when you’re doing something important, then it’s probably net bad. wrong exists
there’s a lot more I could say, but i’m going to sleep (i.e., not fail with abandon)
instead I’ll tldr it:
your brain is wrong:
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you don’t need to do X first to focus on what you’re doing right now
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like actually.
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doing X first won’t actually help you be more productive at what you’re doing right now
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but, you can also choose to not fail with abandon
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probably it’s good to create physical barriers. e.g., keep your phone in a separate room and off and turn off your internet connection and work somewhere that your mind identifies as “work place” (rather than “bedroom”) where you tend to be less distracted.