Fully relate to this feeling. Even as I was reading this post, I switched to check how Codex was doing with a few side projects I was working on and then go back to finishing reading the post :grimacing:

I’m feeling it right now. I had to set a timer for 15 minute on my computer and block all distractions to write this. If I didn’t force myself to focus I would easily get distracted by something after few minutes. Even when I’m doing things that I’ve been waiting to do it, I still feel the urge to do something else.

I don’t know how and when this happened. During the last few years I was always studying, working, and doing open source. And actually got stuff done. Doing all of those at the same time requires paying attention to what I wanted to do and ignore the noise.

Nowadays, I’m lucky if I get 1 hour of focused time. Just to be clear, my goal is not to work 90 hours a week or anything crazy. That is not possible for me. I just want the hour I spend programming, learning, or writing to be just one activity. But instead I spend 10 minute on something then I get distracted, and try to focus again.

Whenever I read anything about distractions or attention spans, I always think about this brilliant article:

According to Cal Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, simply jumping over to check your inbox and coming right back ++can be just as damaging as multitasking++. “When you looked at that email inbox for 15 seconds, you initiated a cascade of cognitive changes.” He says even minor switching from a current task to a different one is “productivity poison.”

Stanford University professor Clifford Nass presciently saw multitasking as particularly insidious. One of his most cited studies assumed that heavy multitaskers would excel at ignoring irrelevant information and at switching tasks, and accordingly would have superior recall. He was wrong on all counts: “We were absolutely shocked,” he ++told “Frontline”++ in 2009. “Multitaskers are terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they’re terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they’re terrible at switching from one task to another.”