Ask HN: How do you optimize your focus? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you optimize your focus?

44 pointsrrr_oh_man51 comments

There is no better feeling than being _in the zone_ for me. I forget to eat, to drink, to communicate. But besides through a fragile symphony music and totally empty surroundings (at home) or a busy café (with headphones) it seems really hard to trigger this flow state. Sprinkle some existential dread on top (due to the current employment situation...), and it becomes nigh-impossible.

So, HN, what are your tricks and hacks to _limitlesslify_ yourself? I'm becoming desperate.

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I believe it's fruitless to try to reach that state. Because the harder you try, more difficult it is to reach. I have been in the zone working on a messy desk, with tons of distractions around. And I have failed to be in the zone with all my website-blocking apps and having my phone away.

You get into the zone because you're obsessed with a problem or an idea. It's the key to being in the flow. Too many people try to optimize the environment, when it helps only a little.

Unfortunately, I only have a little clue how to trigger it. But I do know that what you're working on is the most important part. In addition to that journaling, reading, and meditation help. Other than that, it's okay to leave these things to chance and not try too hard.

> I believe it's fruitless to try to reach that state. Because the harder you try, more difficult it is to reach.

Just like meditation. With meditation my experience was that the "trick" is realizing that meditation isn't a special state that you only go into sometimes, the goal (for want of a better word) is to be in a meditative (aware and undistracted) state all of the time. I think the same may be true of focus/deep work/flow, i.e. the ideal situation would be that you bring your regular state of being closer to the focused state rather than trying to figure out how to get into that special state some of the time.

Personally I have noticed that the limited times I entered the zone happened after midnight, which can become quite unhealthy if you get used to it, that is to work night owl hours.

I guess it has to do with how quiet and serene that time you can become, which helps you jump straight in the zone without even realizing it.

Should we call it "the vortex of absorption", LOL?! :D

You might get the same effect from rising at, say, 4am and going for a quick walk on deserted streets.

I have tried it from 3am until 11am and have noticed the noise starts from 4:30am and afterwards...

Seems like a lot of people where I live start their work from this hour; I presume they are either merchandisers that deliver milk to the nearest supermarkets or lorries that need to get delivered before the morning heavy traffic that schools cause on a daily basis.

I guess in my case, the combination of low lights at night, near complete silence all over the place, and hearing crickets outside the window during my coding hours, it helps immensely to get absorbed by the mystic call of zoning lol!

Amphetimine salts. Changed my life.

(legit ADHD diagnosis, not self medicated, speak with your PCP if able)

Alternatively, Vyvanse or Ritalin work great. For me, Amphetimine salts have too much of an edge

Vyvanse is an amphetamine salt

It's not, it only gets metabolized to dextroamphetamine once it's in the blood stream. This is why it has less of an edge compared to just taking dextroamphetamine.

A life full of exercise, diet, mental guides and therapy... the literally only thing that ever makes me do anything is drug-increased dopamine. It sounds reductionist, but it's literally just that in my experience.

I am not knocking your path. There are many paths to success. Do what works best for you. Some situations require pharma intervention imho, due to brain chemistry. Exercise, diet, and therapy were insufficient for me to reach my full potential. Now I run on all cylinders for $40/month (edit: medication copay).

what specifically does that $40 refer to? For food?

Probably the cost of the medication. Generic Adderall for me is about $30/month

But the point was specifically to avoid medication

and toomuchtodo's response to your point was that for some people medication is needed.

Exercise, therapy, eating well, etc doesn't work for everyone. I've been in therapy most of my life. I still needed ADHD medications to do be able to do normal tasks even when I was also riding my bike well over 200 miles per week and eating well.

What’s wrong with medicine if it makes your life better?

nothing at all. I think I misunderstood

My last two episodes of such "superfocus" happened because the workloads I've been working on were essentially dopamine loops, not unlike playing Diablo or even a slot machine.

The first task was game sound design, and the second one was game marketing. Both tasks seemed impenetrable because I had no experience with either. Yet I managed to create the entire soundscape and SFX for the game in about a month, and, with the second workload, broke into game marketing and started getting some positive response.

Here's how it worked: both impenetrable problems turned out to be breakable into small chunks that were 1) easy enough for a beginner, and 2) came with immediately pleasing rewards on an intermittent schedule. For example, a sound that plays in a previously silent game, or 20 upvotes on a Reddit marketing post are immediately rewarding, but you cannot predict that the next post will be lucky, or that you will find a perfect sound effect on Audiojungle.

Both workloads turned into hugely addictive dopamine loops -- marketing felt similar to Diablo or a slot machine, and looking for sounds on Audiojungle felt like browsing porn. Due to that addictiveness I was able to work for 12-14 hours per day.

The absence of distractions is also helpful: the flow state was at its best at night when my family was sleeping.

* update my hosts file to block sites that suck me in (youtube, reddit and maybe even this one).

* listen to music with no vocals. For whatever reason, vocals distract me from thinking. I often use brain.fm or a "synthwave" set of songs on Spotify.

* write my ideas for architecture/code down on paper and check them off one-by-one. Then handwriting helps me.

Good luck!

The list helps me a lot, if my tasks are linear. But I sympathize in general that it’s not always possible. Rewriting lists when I’m almost there seems to be key.

Breaking down “evaluate framework choices, by making small prototypes” was one I had the other day. First pass was discouraging, because I discovered 3 new frameworks in the course of executing my plan.

Makes sense. But I guess what ultimately worked was rewriting my list once I was half-way into a flow. Once I could actually see all of the puzzle pieces, some switch flipped.

I've found having Netflix play in the background helps a ton. It has to be a show I've seen a few times and know the plot to, so I know what's going on without paying attention when I zone in and out of focus. Something easy to watch like The Office, Scrubs, How I Met Your Mother etc.

Doesn't always work though.

Star Trek is this for me. Having watched the canon series several times over, much of the dialogue is second nature.

This. Also audiobooks of well-trodden stories can work. I used to use the Harry Potter books or the HHGTTG radio show recordings (both on audible) but this only works for programming or other non-math non-language synthesis tasks for me. If I need the language processing part of my brain to actually work for me, rather than being distracted by the voice input so it won’t interrupt me, then I need to use something like music without vocals. The fact that programming falls into the “shut up darn you language centers” category has always perplexed me, but it does. Maybe it just doesn’t always need that side of the brain and kinda takes over when it does? Not sure.

The problem is the distraction. No matter where you're at, each blink of an eye or a smile of some one let you loose your focus. Small thing's, like smoking a cig and leave the room thisfore, or even "I don't like this song, I switch to..to..to.. to that one" - all of this costs you attention and concentration. Although, you can't be concentrated the whole time and you need a break which is typically necessary each 10 to 12 minutes. But this break doesn't mean you're able to consume other information like news while doing the break.

So for me. Working in the night at home works the best. Absolutely no WhatsApp or Instagram or Facebook ding-dong, no screaming outside, no loud sounds.. and then, it helps me even more, when o talk to myself when I do some critical thinking and debugging the whole night xD

Since you asked for a hack, here's one that I use.

Once you find yourself in a moment of struggle with staying focused, getting into the "right state", etc., do the following. Put everything aside, grab a pencil and a piece of paper, and go to some quiet place. Sit still and quiet for 10 minutes. Do absolutely nothing - produce minimum entropy. Then start writing down everything that starts coming down to your mind: any thoughts, worries, ideas, whatsoever. Keep writing until you feel like nothing else to add. Put a date and return to what you've been doing. You can throw the paper away or hide it somewhere, but most importantly forget about it.

Call it brain dumping or anything else. For me it doesn't mater how it works unless it works. I have my own adjustments to this technique, but generally it's the same. Sometimes I get very surprising insights and get simple answers for questions which seemed to be complicated. Sometimes it just helps to clear up my mind. Anyways, I hope you'll find it useful. Good luck!

Edited: typos

Personally I go work somewhere else, University or a coffee shop, preferably far from home so I can't be home again in 15 minutes. If needed you can also use a blocker in smartphone and laptop.

At home with my desktop computer I just can't get focused, I end up on youtube, twitter, etc... in a public setting you have peer pressure not to start watching memes or whatever, plus you get the benefit of the "ritual" or "context switch" of commuting and working in a different space.

I'm far from productive or a master at focus though and I'm still learning and working on it, but this works when I just can't seem to concentrate for 5min at home.

Keto/carnivore diet, fasting, cold showers, put the phone away, block websites (like this), focusmate, etc.

Veg diet reduces inflammation in gut, hence reduced gut brain axis bad chatter.

Meditation

Belief in a higher purpose

Yoga/exercise

when i’m really struggling with this, what i do is walk away from the computer. i take a pen and paper (eink tablet these days) and write my implementation functions by hand—usually in pseudocode, sometimes in realistic code, sometimes just an outline. enough to get my head into the space without distraction. sometimes i’ll work a whole day this way, then take it all to the computer and transcribe it into running code.

the kindle scribe has been nice for this because i’m not tempted by other apps on the tablet as with my ipad, and i still have documentation readily available in ebook form.

Flow comes from grinding away at the work.

Not the other way around.

Anything that avoids grinding away at the work, avoids flow.

Trying to be efficient. Trying to optimize. Trying to align the stars. These are not grinding away at the work.

You've been interrupted? So what. Nobody cares. Get back to grinding away at the work.

The only magic trick is grinding away at the work.

Good luck.

I put pink noise in my ears. I made the track with Audacity with a duration of 1h, so I know 1h passed when the noise stops. I can take a break and re-iterate.

I cannot speak higher of https://mynoise.net/ It is so amazing for pink noise and all the other noises. I basically always have a tab with this up.

Second this. The only downside is so many options and presets but when you find one it's magic. For a very small fee you can export a custom mp3 which further eliminates the potential for fiddling

1. Health and Wellness - don't skim over this.

You have to know yourself to keep yourself capable of peak productivity.

2. Only work on things you're passionate about.

I've found that I only become distracted and unable to focus, ironically, if I'm not sufficiently busy.

If I don't have enough real, important things to do on any given day, white noise begins to creep into my psyche and I end up shaving yaks.

So anecdotally load yourself up with even more stuff to do!

Noise cancelling headphones + Unending music/movie without commercials + Silent phones + Highly specific completion metric -> "Builds in under 20 minutes without errors" allows me to ignore every other distracting thought as the goal defines the activity.

Zen Buddhist training. It's training in cultivating a permanent flow state. For starters, it's a half hour of zazen every morning, and a longer period, once or twice a week. Some people think they can get the same thing from meditation apps, or whatever else is popular these days, but there's no substitute for the real thing: working one-on-one with a teacher, participating in longer retreats, studying koans, debating and discussing, learning the history and philosophy of a thousand-year old branch of a 2500-year-old tradition.

Maybe just remove all distractions and see what happens.

Wow, why didn't I think of that?

I think it is easier said than done.

My setup is to get a dumb phone, uninstall every unrelated applications on my laptop, install everyting related to the current personal project, test to make sure, and then stay in a cafe without wifi for a few hours.

It is probably a lot cheaper than staying in a motel as John Carmack did.

eat, hydrate, exercise, sleep, meditate, stay connected with the people you care, learn to ask for help in real life.

Listening to Roots Reggae music, especially Bob Marley, helps me relax and concentrate. YMMV.

Working on my own project that I care about instead of mismanaged corporate bullshit.

I say no and listen to Hans Zimmerman music

I get amazing focus on train and bus rides.

The Ryan Doris YouTube channel

Give up on that bullshit and just get the work done.

Take care of your body and mind and the rest of life becomes a lot easier.

This is my conclusion too.

Frustratingly, productivity seems to be mostly downstream of good self-care: exercise, good sleep, avoiding caffeine, and good diet in my personal descending order of importance.

It sucks that they're interrelated, and one of those, good sleep, can be a biological dice roll, and that the other three are things I'm tempted to burn on the altar of extra productivity in the short-term when it just decreases it in the long-term. :p

I don't.

None of our western nonsense. If you need any mind related optimization you need to look at the east. Hundreds of exercises such as trataka which will produce guaranteed results.

Is this a daily practice for you ? Send me an email if you can! I learned about trataka from an old post from you and here you are again...

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