đŻ Lacking Focus
Good morning friends! đ
This week was rather uneventful and the best way I can describe it is âmeh.â Thatâs not a bad thing, life canât always be exhilarating.
Anyway, letâs get into it! đ
On Wednesday, I finished reading Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (affiliate link), and letâs just say WOW.
I am not going to exaggerate and say âIt changed my lifeâ, but it changed my perspective on many things.Â
Stolen Focus digs into the Attention Epidemic that is affecting our ability to focus. The average US office worker only concentrates on a single task for three minutes, and the average college student is 65 seconds.
The curtailing in focus has been happening for centuries, so it's not simply due to the rise of the internet. A study conducted by the Technical University of Denmark showed that trending news topics appear and fade at quicker rates year on year since the 1800s.
One statistic that really struck me was: In 2017, the average American spent just 17 minutes a day reading while spending 5.4 hours on their phones.
Thats mental.
Now, why is our attention eroding? Well, there is no one single reason, but some of the main culprits covered in the book are:
Social Media:Â TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. are custom-built to keep you there. Features such as infinite scrolling, arbitrary metrics (likes, comments, etc.), and constant dopamine hits were developed by hundreds of software engineers to make you addicted to their platform. These companies literally get paid for how long you spend on their app, no matter the mental cost to the consumer.
Exhaustion:Â The book says that 15% of us wake up feeling refreshed. The average time we sleep has been reduced by an hour since 1942. Sleep is a fundamental process for humans to rest, recover, and literally clean our metabolic waste.
Nutrition:Â The proportion of the population that is overweight and obese has exponentially been increasing. One reason is the rise of fast food and more sugary diets. The typical Western breakfast contains white bread and cereal, which gives you a sugar spike and crash within two hours. This is not beneficial for long-lasting concentration.
These are just three of the twelve causes that Hari discusses in the book.
To be honest with myself, I have noticed my attention reducing over the years. I constantly flip between tasks and devices, struggle to go more than an hour without needing some âtech-dopamineâ hit, and rarely focus on a single activity for an hour.Â
Itâs an accepted concept inside the tech community that Developers, Engineers, and Data Scientists need uninterrupted coding blocks to produce high-quality code and algorithms. Any distraction that takes you out of this âflow stateâ is very detrimental and will take at least several minutes to get back into the zone. How are we meant to produce high-quality work with such poor focus?
In the book, Hari reiterates several times that the reduction in focus is not your fault and that the system is responsible. I mainly agree with this point, but these are some of the things I am trying to do to win back my focus.
Delete Social Media Apps:Â I never had TikTok and have deleted Instagram and Facebook. I still have X (Twitter), as I partly need it to help distribute my content, and I often donât find myself scrolling through it. By deleting these apps, I pick up my phone much less and spend less time on it.
Tech Out Of Reach:Â My phone is now nearly always on silent mode and in a different room to the one I am working in, likewise with my iPad. Before bed, I try to read for 30 minutes and my phone is not at the side of the bed but somewhere else in the room.Â
Digital Minimalism and Clean:Â I have unsubscribed from nearly all emails that provide no value. Similarly, I only have notifications enabled on apps that I really need to see. This reduces the amount of distracting "pings" I receive.
Creating More Than Consuming:Â One of my so-called âmantrasâ is to create more than I consume. What this means between the lines is that I am biased for doing things such as making videos, writing blogs, and trying new coding techniques instead of infinitely watching YouTube, or scrolling on my phone. I get a lot of satisfaction from creating, and a lot less from consuming.
I am by no means perfect, my girlfriend would say I have a âmildâ addiction to YouTube, and she is probably right, but I am trying to address that. I think the steps I am taking are pushing me in the right direction.
So, I challenge you to not go on your phone for a couple of hours, donât go on Instagram or TikTok for a day, or anything you think is ruining your attention, and see what happens. I promise you will be surprised.
Whatâs Been Cooking đ„
Some tasty stories this week:
Sam Altman Back At OpenAIÂ -Â It was a whirlwind of a weekend for OpenAI. They sacked CEO Sam Altman on Friday, was reinstated on Tuesday, and then the majority of the board were fired. Whilst all this was happening, Altman was offered a job at Microsoft to lead "a new advanced AI research team.â
Inflection AI Release Inflection-2Â Â -Â The AI startup Inflection has just launched their new 175 billion parameter LLM, which they claim is better than Metaâs Llama 2 and Googleâs PaLM.
OpenAIâs Q* Algorithm - OpenAI developed a model called Q*, which they claim can solve basic maths problems. Current models canât generalise to data that they werenât trained on, so this is the first example of a model learning something outside its remit.
Weekly Favourites â€ïž
đŹÂ YouTube - Nischa. Nischa is an ex-banker turned YouTuber who posts weekly content on everything finance. I like the minimalistic style of her videos, which is a similar vibe I am trying with my channel! If you want any personal finance and investing tips, then Nischaâs channel is your go-to place.
đ Book - Atomic Habits by James Clear. Feels like everyone whoâs into personal development or productivity has read Atomic Habits and for good reason. I am really enjoying Jamesâ storytelling and âclearâ actionable advice on building better habits and allowing the power of compounding. This is probably one of the best âself-helpâ books out there.
đ Article - Price wars: the rise of gradient boosting machines. One of my ex-colleagues sent me this article he wrote that compares the use of Generalised Linear Models (GLM) vs Gradient Boosting Trees (GBT) for insurance pricing. In my old job, I worked on similar problems, predicting the burn cost using the CatBoost GBT model. The take on this article is that GBTs are arguably superior and much easier to model with than GLMs. I would agree with this point, although some hard-core actuaries may be slightly upset with this notion!
(PS: Some links are affiliate links that I get a kickback from with no extra cost to you đ)