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Comment by harryf | Hacker News Reader

Strikes me that the ability to focus and direct ones own attention will (or already has) become a new form of class divide; those who can concentrate and those who can't. And it will likely have much different boundaries than earlier class divisions like wealth - in fact the wealthy are more likely to struggle given greater access to a wide range of digital products.

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It reminds me of Cal Newport's book Deep Work, where he argues those who can deliberately focus in the 21st century and actively deny themselves from being distracted (scheduled e-mail reading, banning Slack, only reading news certain times of the day) and go deep in subject matters will have massive advantages in the knowledge economy. The open office trend certainly hasn't helped. One of my friends who is a ML coder says he'll get 4x done in a single day at home compared to going to work where he gets bombarded by conversations.

After reading many books related to apps and attention (e.g. Hooked!, Irresistible), I elected to give up using Facebook, Instagram, and put heavy restrictions on my habit of going to Reddit/NYTimes/News Websites.

And I'll print things from the web so that I can concentrate on it without distraction in a quiet room with no digital distractions.

When I was younger, I probably called Knuth a luddite for abstaining from e-mail all the way back in the 90s. But wow, my opinion has done a full 180 over the 2010s.

Another thing I did recently - shut off all alerts on my phone other than text messages and Telegram (both of which are pretty rare in my case). Before doing that I would get alerts from my personal email, a family email and multiple work emails. Now I get hardly any alerts and already feel much more productive throughout the work day because these things aren't catching my eye/ear so often. It's really interesting.

My phone spends 99% of its time either off or in silent mode. I turn it off/down during work hours so I can focus, and then I forget to turn it back on/up. It annoys the crap out of my friends / family, but it's worth it. I use it as an answering machine, GPS, and casual web browser.

What I haven't figured out how to do is do the same thing with work communications (Slack et all). Since I work remotely, it's important that I have a virtual office door that people can knock at. The problem is that if you too often have your door closed on Slack, people complain that you're never available. If you have your door open too often (the default), you always have this nagging feeling that you're going to be interrupted soon, so you may as well not start on anything that requires focus.

^^^ Does anyone here work remotely and have a good solution for this?

Have the door closed during certain hours (slack has a dnd mode, which can be overridden if it is important) then people will learn to contact you during those times, especially if you down prioritise those who accept the system.

You are going to catch some slack, offset that by producing more/better than anyone.

Accept the system -> abuse the system.

> And I'll print things from the web so that I can concentrate on it without distraction in a quiet room with no digital distractions.

Kindle paired with Instapaper or similar service is great too. Saves a tree or three in lifetime as well :)

I do something similar to the printing thing. I send interesting but long articles to Instapaper. Instapaper delivers them to my Kindle where I read the articles in my downtime.

A counterpoint is Warren Buffett. His office doesn't have a phone or computer or anything that might interrupt him. He tells his secretary to hold everything while he goes inside, kicks back, and reads volume after volume of market data. To me, focus is more accessible to the wealthy. If I could afford it, I'd pay someone to handle Slack/phone/email for me so I could do what I most enjoy, which is get into a flow with the knowledge that I won't be interrupted.

It's true that the wealthy need discipline in order to achieve focus, but the poor need discipline and an environment that is conducive to focus. The latter is getting rarer and rarer. The very poor often live in crowded, noisy, and even unsafe areas.

I would argue the opposite. The poor are incentivized to use free (but containing ads) products. The rich can pay their way out of those attention seeking ads.

Or pay someone else to take care of certain chores so that they have the time to sit down and think.

Seriously been considering doing this for food.

I would agree with this, but it isn't even just straight ads. Think about something like Netflix - the $10 a month subscription is nothing to the rich person, so if they don't use it or use it for one or two shows they don't care. To the poor person they need to use it to justify the expenditure. So essentially they are incentivized to consume more, in a very indirect way.

> Think about something like Netflix - the $10 a month subscription is nothing to the rich person

I don't see myself as rich, more like middle class, and $10 is nothing I worry about too much.

Not $10 as a lump sum, but a subscription?

Get netflix. Binge watch for a month. Cancel. Repeat when you feel like and can afford.

That was exactly the point OP was making. For a poorer person, Netflix might be a few times a year splurge. What happens when an anticipated slow month turns busy? This person is torn between "wasting" $10 that they really can't afford to spend again next month or neglect other things in their life to get their money's worth this month.

I read him as saying, "have netflix always and always binge watch".

I thought that comment was strange as well. For $10/month, Netflix provides a bevy of entertainment. It's probably one of the cheapest forms of entertainment - even more so among paid forms of entertainment.

If you're hurting for cash, try to get an amplified indoor antenna and Netflix. You'll make a one-time purchase of $20-$40 for an antenna[0], (likely) receive a decent channel selection[1], and $10/month for on demand streaming.

[0]: This is the antenna that I have in my home, and I want to kick myself for not getting an antenna sooner: https://www.amazon.com/1byone-Amplified-Detachable-Performan...

[1]: Confirm available OTA channeles here: http://www.tvfool.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view...

> Think about something like Netflix - the $10 a month subscription is nothing to the rich person, so if they don't use it or use it for one or two shows they don't care. To the poor person they need to use it to justify the expenditure.

Netflix has a hundred million subscribers. It's hardly a rich man's entertainment.

And the poor in social capital have to, or at least can easily feel like they have to, jump at attention-devouring social networks because they need every visibility boost they can get.

People who already have a bunch of good connections can relax because they know they're embedded enough in the minds of their friends and colleagues that dropping off Twitter for a week won't be risking missing the one opportunity that they need to break into the next social class up.

The ability to read a broadsheet newspaper rather than a tabloid 'newspaper' was the old 'class divide'. In the pre-internet days when newspapers were still allegedly important, not everyone could read a full length article in 'The Manchester Guardian'. (Not sure what the U.S. equivalent would be).

Papers like 'The Sun' and 'The Daily Mail' were there to entertain and brainwash. Their headline writers were absolutely excellent at what they did, e.g. 'FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER'. Does that not pique your curiosity? There is not a lot that can be added to that story - did the hamster taste nice? Who knows, the hamster was never eaten and the article was a bit of 'fake news' (clickbait) and was there to promote the comedian's up and coming tour.

Most people elected to read something other than 'The Guardian' even if they went broadsheet rather than tabloid. For every Guardian reader there were ten 'Telegraph' readers and maybe three 'Times' readers. Now I was a paperboy back then so I read all the papers extremely quickly. Only 'The Guardian' and 'The Financial Times' interested me enough to not speed read. It amused me to see people waste their attention on the other papers. Why spend a Sunday ploughing through The Sunday Times? It was a good all-day read back then. Yet I felt a lot of people were going through the motions, trying to focus on these stupid papers that rarely had more than one genuine bit of investigative journalism in them, if that.

As a child with every paper free to read every day I gravitated towards the newspaper requiring attention. I could have just stared at Sam Fox's breasts on page 3 of the Sun but preferred the financial pages of the Guardian, followed by the international news. Importantly I decided this for myself, not out of peer pressure. Moving swiftly on to today and here I am reading HN instead of whatever junk appears as 'news' on the Internet Explorer home page or the online version of the Daily Mail. Why am I again in the minority of people seeking more than PR pieces about 'hamsters being eaten'?

It seems like a manifestation of the same divide to me: those who pay to direct (or misdirect) peoples attention, and those who consume the messages.

Start everyday as a producer, not a consumer.

https://lifehacker.com/5887345/start-every-day-as-a-producer...

So will the wealthy be disproportionately affected by issues with concentration? That seems to be the implication of your statement. However, I'm also unconvinced that the ability to concentrate (above an average level, at least) has historically been an important component of accumulating wealth.

Chemistry is tacitly striving to help. I mean, things like Adderal or Ritalin don't need any marketing around people whose jobs need concentrated attention. But those are controlled substances; nicotine, less so, and caffeine is just dispensed for free in most offices.

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