How to reduce 'attention residue'

"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.

On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode --- like, one day every six months. " https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

[footnote] I'm from the physical sciences, not CS, but the man transcends departments!

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200121-why-procrastin...

I've been working to overcome burnout that took me out of the game a year ago. What it basically came down to is that midlife crisis feelings had come to dominate my psyche. I found myself asking "what's the point?" about basic tasks that must be done.

The start of a cure turned out to be separating a task into writing the todo list for it and then doing it afterwards. The next evolution of that is to also separate your evaluation of the work from the work itself, so that you don't wallow in critical feelings as you work. Try to be zenful and just concentrate on the now.

Basically it all comes down to anxiety management. So for example, say you are cleaning and you get a text message to deal with an issue. I normally would make a mental note to remember to do it, since I lean towards intellectual pursuits. But it's better to add the item to the top of your todo list and stop thinking about it or the fear of forgetting it. Better yet, pause cleaning (since it's low-priority) and deal with the issue immediately.

I've found that mechanizing the thought processes that I had taken for granted until they failed me boosted my mood. If you think of it as a scale from 0 to 10, our default with stress is to hover below a 5 (say 3). It takes effort to get above 5. But there is a stable orbit around 7 if you can maintain it for a few weeks. I think this is why people with a positive disposition have so much difficulty understanding people with anxiety, because physically they actually feel similar, it's just that our subjective interpretation of them are different:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcGyVTAoXEU

Edit: the above is a TED talk about changing this subjective reaction to stress.

Edit #2: I accidentally shared the wrong video, I was thinking of this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rRgElTeIqE

I used to do a full GTD system, but now honestly it’s opening my todos, cleaning out my inbox into todos, tidying them up, prioritising them, and then doing the remaining twenty minutes of them.

No more than 25 minutes, occasionally less than, and I think I’ve not been stressed about the (sometimes very large amounts of) admin bullshit that shows up in my life.

When I had a real management job I did a second one of these for work each morning when I got in.

Anyway, same system for 15 years, with occasional embellishments. These days I take two of them a week to do my personal and company accounts and budgeting instead.

this is the essence of mindfulness

The whole article falls apart right here for me, there's just no way this is true. I seriously doubt the University of Melbourne is in any way able to get its almost 50,000 enrolled students to stop partying for a week. They may run GYLIO events that week, but that doesn't mean it's going to get a bunch of college students to stop drinking.