Comment by iainctduncan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iainctduncan | Hacker News Reader

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This is a topic I'm somewhat obsessed over. I think it's a real problem these days, we are bombarded with things competing to make us into short-attention-spanned dopamine addicts and it screws up our lives badly. The Matthew Crawford books "The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction" and "Shopcraft as Soulcraft" are super interesting reads on this topic.

I'm biased, being a musician, but my experience and many of my colleagues is that musicians are often excellent coders, and I credit this to the fact that you need to master your attention to become a good musician. There is no other way than getting good at putting yourself alone in a room with no distractions and practicing in a focused manner. I remember when I hired a friend of mine (pro bass player) as a junior coder and it was so obvious watching him learn.

Personally my top tips for getting better at attention management would be:

- Take up an instrument or some other hobby involving regular, quiet, uninterrupted, solo deliberate practice. Do it daily. It becomes your rinse cycle.

- Adopt the pomorodoro or other similar technique of doing 20-30 minutes of completely focused, uninterrupted work at a time and then taking a real break for a few minutes. This is both how I work and practice.

- Read a lot, on paper.

- Run - IMHO way better than lifting for overall mental effects and mental focus

- Get enough sleep, religiously

my two cents Canadian. :-)

I'm not a musician but I noticed this problem with games. I have always been a dopamine addict with a short attention span. If I find something exciting it will be easy for me to get sucked into it.

I now have an issue(addiction) with competitive multiplayer games. I get really good at them very quickly, I even won tournaments before it became a career option. However, I realized these are causing massive anxiety in my life, hurt my ability to concentrate, hurt my ability to stick to a project and destroyed my sleeping schedule. One of the worst games was Rocket League. I uninstalled multiple times and like an addict told myself I will be responsible this time and reinstalled it.....to end up where I began...angry at 3 AM....at a dumb video game. Since then, I completely uninstalled it but Warzone has filled that void....I have to stop playing that too as it is too addicting for me.

Single player games are not an issue and are actually calming as it seems that it is the competitive aspect that keeps me engaged.

Reading books also helps me significantly and has improvement my attention span.

Have you tried channeling that gaming energy into physical sports? Golf? Tennis? Those things are at least good for your health, and you can't exactly play tennis all day long, you have to share the court, and you can't mess up your sleep.

Yes, until I started having widespread tendon issues due to flouroquinolone antibiotics. Sports are out of the picture for me most likely forever. Plus it is not like playing sports hard is healthy either. I tore abdomen muscles, have torn labrum in my hip from soccer, etc.

Ever tried golf? It’s incredibly addicting and a great sport to get into for the long haul. Basically nothing about golf can hurt your body. If you’re torquing your back you’re doing it wrong!

Nothing, except not hearing the "fore" call.

I love video games and play regularly (but casually). I've seen quite a few programmers who suck at their jobs basically because they are up late at night playing video games.

I've been addicted to video games in the past, but these days I only play console games and ones that are suited to casual play. And I only have Mac computers so I can't play most games anyways even if I was tempted. I also save money on expensive gaming PC rigs

Try Chess. The game is complex enough, so you won't be able to master it very quickly, and it retains the competitive aspect that you seek.

I’m a fellow musician and also obsessed with the idea of how music and specifically, deliberate practice, play into programming.

It’s a super power. I’ve also noticed musicians are usually terrific coders.

A big part of being a great musician is years of learning HOW to practice. Glad to see others interested in the space.

Not just a big part, THE big part. :-)

Agreed! I got back into piano at the beginning of quarantine and it's been really interesting for learning how I learn. As you said, to make any level of progress on new pieces I need to break it up in to short 20 min exercises interleaved with breaks. My ability to motivate myself and to retain anything is also directly correlated with the amount of sleep I get. Going to check out your book recommendations as well!

I started leaning the piano 4 months ago with a remote tutor and it’s been such a pleasant experience. I absolutely love learning new systems, and music is a fascinating system with such interesting tangible results, it reminds me of my first experiences with web dev where I got to see this thing I myself created come to life. I agree that music practice is such a transferable skill. There are no shortcuts, but there are tricks of the trade that make absolutely no sense at first but you keep and it and pieces start clicking. I’m glad I started a side project around the same time, because I find I am applying similar discipline to both and it’s a really fun cycle to be living through at the moment :)

You bring up an interesting point that I (and Crawford) think is massively important nowadays. When you learn a real skill, like really learn it from a master, part of what you are doing is learning to trust an authority outside of yourself. Good technique in so many disciplines feels weird, awkward, wrong, and un-fun when you first try it. But the discipline decides on right, not us. The instrument, or the golf ball, or whatever real physical thing that you have to work with determines correct technique, and we have to learn how to make that feel natural through years of effort. I believe this is a huge part of the benefit of deliberate practise: you learn that "oh this feels good" or "this seems to work for me, and what I think matters most" is not good enough. And in this day and age of so much "me me how I feel me" and instant gratification, learning that humility is a really valuable skill. Music will teach you that the path to effortless mastery is full of twists and turns, and is often uncomfortable. We only get there when we decide it's ok to be uncomfortable.

What is your opinion on reading on the Kindle? Is it as effective as reading a physical book? I own tons of physical books but am completely out of shelf space for new books.

Yeah I guess really I mean something that doesn't have the ability to check email, bleep at you for an incoming text and all that other crap. I personally get screen fatigue so I use paper. But to me the important part is that it's "just a book", not a book that will try to make you change what you're doing every 10 minutes!

I'll argue that using an Android-based tablet with the latest "digital well-being" features are superior to any e-reader. A few things on this worth noting:

- Making notes / taking highlights. The touchscreen navigation is far easier and fluid in making selections. Furthermore, you get an automatic sync to google drive feature

- Indexing: The speed for searching the entire text contents for keywords is much faster and again, a more seamless, non-janky experience

- Lookups: Built in dictionaries are much faster and easier to navigate / dismiss

- Readability: OLED with inverted text and red-light dimming makes for an excellent reading experience, lights on/off

- Distractions: You can limit these with bedtime and focus modes

there are a few eink tablets that run android as well. onyx boox is one brand of the top of my head that uses android 10 so it's still fairly up to date. i never considered an oled even though!

I mainly just want something I can install syncthing on so i can add books and articles from my laptop and have them show up on the device.

I love my Kindle. I'm out of space for physical books and just love the reading experience on the Kindle. I think it works because it's a distraction-free device. It does one thing and it does it well.

I have the Kindle app on my iPad, and it is the best thing ever. I don't install social media apps on it or anything like that. I don't find it bad at all.

I think you are mixing up causation and correlation here.

Learning an instrument isn't going to make you a better programmer; applying pedological techniques you used to learn an instrument to learning programming might.

Ah but did I say it would? Nope. I said musicians are often great programmers, and I said practicing music will help you master your attention. Whether you apply that to other areas is up to you. I would argue that learning to master your attention gives you the opportunity and a helpful foundation to improve better in all kinds of things, but believe me, I would never make the claim that there is instant and direct transference.

I’m glad to see this be recognized. I’ve left companies because of strong meeting and ping culture: chat ops is depressing and disruptive to me.

Thanks for mentioning those books. Which one we should read first?

"World beyond ..." if you are interested more into attention aspect. Just "Introduction" to that book is golden and full of novel (for me) ideas.

Thanks, will definitely read it. I also like Deep Work, and The Shallows, but I bet you already know them.

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