Why can't we concentrate? | Hacker News Reader

Why can't we concentrate?

salon.com

60 pointsrobg22 comments

I had to keep dragging my attention back to the article and force myself to finish it. Sometimes we are distracted because what we're supposed to be doing is genuinely of little (and declining) interest.

Why force yourself to watch the film all the way through?

When I'm doing mathematics, or programming, or designing, or drawing, I have no problem. When I'm reading tedious articles that provide little or no insight, my attention wanders.

I wonder why?

This happen with me also, I don't read text, I just scan it quickly. If the author didn't interest me from the starting that there's a result he wants to get, then I'll leave (and I have done so in this one)

Limiting yourself to works with a narrative hook in the first few sentences is a mistake.

yes i know but when i feel that i'm reading something not useful i will be not interested and then it has no sense for reading it and i'll simply give up!

Narrative hook is not the point. Having a sense of real contentand cogent argument leading to a useful conclusion, is.

All too frequently missing.

without sounding pretentious - one of the biggest things I've found is that today's authors suffer from a lack of eloquence. Communicating well is not something that's simple to master, and few are truly good at it - in the same way that computer science is a discipline, there are myriad courses in university devoted to communication.

But we're trying to glean insight and information from blog posts and articles often produced by time starved writers, first time bloggers or similar. The art of communication is being lost in search for the sound bite, the skim reader- the 20 second attention.

Perhaps we should all commit to reading a book a week- or how about writing a short story: surely the better we are at communicating then the more enriched we will be as a society?

It seems to me that eloquent writing actually makes it harder to skim and decide that it's worth reading. I used to read things because I liked how they were written, but now that it's become clear to me that there's more than I could ever hope to get to in years, I just want to get to the point and on to the next thing; I find myself skimming even novels I'm reading while on public transit, looking for the conclusion.

My point is just that great writing takes more attention and time, and so will simply have a smaller audience. I wish writers would worry less about putting together just the right turn of phrase and simply say what they want to say.

I find myself skimming even novels I'm reading while on public transit

Well, I think this is all very personal and our experiences cannot be generalized into a trend. In direct opposition to your experience, I've recently started to actually read books, instead of just skimming them for the story. The balance was tipped by the first book of the Gormenghast trilogy "Titus Groan" by Mervyn Peake... really wonderful prose.

As long as you are not able to keep your concentration because something is not being of use that's actually great.

Most of the people complain on not being able to keep concentrating on tasks they do find of use tho, but which need long periods of concentration. I think that should be the focus of the article/discussion.

The internet is the thing that distract me most, the problem is that you want to always "keep on the loop".

I can only concentrate, sovle a problem or code when I disconnect, I have a "fear" that every moment something is happening in Twitter, Gmail, Facebook and that I need to be up-to-date.

The solution: I still thinking.....

It's tough to program (and doubly tough to do system administration!) without being connected to the internet to search for documentation or solutions to problems.

I have a hard time keeping myself from getting distracted, especially when I'm doing something with intermittent downtime ( http://xkcd.com/303/ , rebooting computers, etc). The only real solution I can think of is to attempt to increase my discipline. Technical solutions all seem inadequate and even silly when you know you can trivially circumvent them.

Download the API docs. Turn off the internet. No reason to really need the 'web when coding... And when you get into bugs you're looking for help on: leave them aside and work on something else- fix them all in one burst. We make excuses for network connectivity, but in reality, we can easily get our work done without it.

For more proof- just ask all your hacker friends where they get the most work done - the answer is nearly always on flights. :)

Some people do not work like that. I look stuff up constantly (if only to make sure there's not a function already existing to do what I'm doing, or to run an error through Google; searching for a quick answer is almost always my first response to any problem, after which I figure it out myself if there's no such answer. Trying to figure out a solution to something that's already solved is make-work, and I have actual work to do.

Donald Knuth says: [http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html]

> 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. [...]

And Richard Stallman doesn't use a web browser: [http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/]

> For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.

Closer to here, Paul Graham also recommends Disconnecting Distraction. [http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html]

Maybe we should try learning from them.

I forgot something: My whiteboard and penciles, when I write on my whiteboard (standing up) I have a lot of concentration, I happen that a lot of times i plan and write code (or math) on the whiteboard and then recopy it

I totally agree with their perspectives.. (maybe not going as far as not using a web browser, but I'm sure concentration is not his only reason for this).

If you have a cellphone on which you received calls from people you follow on twitter everytime they tweeted, and a cellphone on which you received calls everytime you received an email, chances would be that you wouldn't be able to do around 5 minutes of work without being interrupted by a phone call. Therefore, if your activity required a longer period of concentration, chances are you wouldn't be able to achieve/complete it.

Curiously, most people use the internet like they were those cellphones and then complain about it. The beauty of the internet and the computer is that you can bend it to your will, so you could turn it into a newspaper if you wanted to pay the 1 day delay, for instance.

Know what you're doing, why you're doing it and for whom you're doing it. Have long term goals in mind, and better understand purpose.

I think younger people have adapted to incessant overflowing information by adopting such measures.

I'm skeptical about there actually being a decrease in attention. I hear this kind of stuff about "the good old days" in quality X all the time and I suspect people are just forgetting that they were also distracted back then.

I wrote about a lot of the "concentration desert" articles in a post on laptops, students, and distraction at http://jseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distraction-... . Maybe the answer is disconnecting ourselves from the Internet when we need to really, deeply work.

This may be why:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.emacs/msg/821a0f04bab918...

"with a culture that is becoming more impatient and managers demanding ever more blind _effort_ to maintain ever stricter bottom lines, it's sadly obvious that we are moving into a way of working that is predominantly _conscious_, for which I believe the human brain was never prepared."

Concentrate? But this article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=603314

claims we should strive to have ADD!

I guess this means life ain't simple and no single strategy works 100% of the time.

through "forced" repeated and rapid decision making we tend to pass on the things too fast without much deliberation by considering oneself smart. But stick to some things very well like music/twitter/ etc etc. Its not actually question of concentration; we are trying to cope up with information overload and sifting and filtering is required or at least such requirement is perceived

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