> … It’s when you are doing something meaningful to you, and you really get into it, and time falls away, and your ego seems to vanish, and you find yourself focusing deeply and effortlessly…
Oh. Have I missed “the flow”.
I have been trying to get back into the mode from a while, with lot of self doubt in mind, “ you are just lazy”, “you are too distracted by Twitter “, “were you like this all along”..
It hit me hard when I realised that.. it’s been a decade and I still not able to achieve this.
I'm glad that the article specified that individual effort is important. Too often, people act as if a collective solution is exclusive of the ability to improve your personal situation in the meanwhile (this accounts for probably 95% of usage of the term "victim-blaming" that I see online, including on HN)
But I'm also a strong believer that raw willpower is a poor substitute for a supportive environment. I've had great results the last 15 years from identifying rough edges in my computing workflows and sanding them off with scripts and OS tweaks. Between the rise of the Internet attention ecosystem and my own higher bar for focus as I get older, more and more of this iteration loop has been consumed by optimizations to improve focus and prevent distraction. "Automating willpower" like this has borne some pretty fantastic results when it comes to my ability to focus and thus both my productivity and mental health.
Sadly, most people don't use a proper general-purpose OS like a Linux distro[1], and are locked out of the ability to change much of their environment. Mobile devices remain a stubborn challenge: While I'm considering getting back into rooting my devices after a decade, this is a pretty poor substitute for a proper OS, so I'm also trying to build habits that shift usage from my phone to my laptop.
In the event that you haven't tried scripting up guardrails against attention hazards (or are still using an OS that prohibits you from using your computer fully), I strongly recommend taking a serious look at this approach.
[1] I'm explicitly excluding Windows due to my familiarity with the severe limitations it puts on the user, all smartphone OSes are the most egregious offenders, and my familiarity with OS X is lower but I gather that it falls between Windows and a Linux distro in terms of how much it babies/limits the user.
Oh. Have I missed “the flow”.
I have been trying to get back into the mode from a while, with lot of self doubt in mind, “ you are just lazy”, “you are too distracted by Twitter “, “were you like this all along”..
It hit me hard when I realised that.. it’s been a decade and I still not able to achieve this.