Surviving the era of distraction

We are fighting million thoughts and viruses every day. While our immune system has developed through the centuries and we barely control or pay attention how it happens. At least before the moment it fails and we get sick.

Now we’re in the era of information having new challenges every day. Every hour, minute and second. Thousand of thoughts, hundreds of ideas and dozens of perspectives are bombarding our brains. For single-threaded machine that sucks at context switching that’s a disaster.

Context switching

Digging through the articles earlier this year I found proofs and results of how expensive context switching is. It was specifically about developers and daily schedule having too much meetings. The outcome was clear - it takes around 25 minutes to get back to context for having even small like 2-minute long conversation.

“I just have a short questions” costs specific engineer half an hour. If you’re a business owner - divide hourly rate by 2. That’s the price of a simple question. If that’s more complex - someone may drop it’s complex task for the rest of the day because of the costs of getting back all the context they had.

People care about this example because it can be expressed monetary, but the same happens with each and every of us. Social medias teaches us wrong patterns, we start to follow that in other areas of life. Now we’re struggling to read a short chapter of a book. How many of us is able to focus for a time long enough and write one?

Conscousnes vs frameworks

Pomodoro timer is an approach I’ve met too many times. I must admit I tried to adopt it multiple times but it did not work. I found out I can have quite a long sessions of deep focus. Recently I discovered that’s probably hyper focus which isn’t really the best thing, though.

There are other approaches that help to keep the tempo. And I think these all are artificial. We don’t need any timer-schedule to watch an interesting movie, play a game and do what we love. I always treated my ability to do something for a prolonged period of time as a direction suggestion.

Experimenting and approaching many solutions through the years made me to thing we were wired for a specific scenario. We pick a topic aka direction, we start “wiring” ourself to it and brain starts to move into that direction like a train following the rails.

And modern lifestyle replace straight railways with endless road-crosses. Each minute something new can happen. We’re fascinated by the wonders of modern world. And we are depleted chasing it.

The way our brain works isn’t new. But the environment changed drastically. This is why it’s not enough to be conscious. We need discipline instead. Set of rules, schedules, plans, goals. Define a framework. Or a system. All these words are used interchangeably. All these means one thing: get to know who you are and what do you want.

Don’t escape the distraction matrix

Escaping the Matrix, switching to 5D world and other concepts are getting popular a while ago. In reality essence hasn’t changed for centuries. Finding own place in the world, finding reason to live and something worth to die for.

I like the movie and I feel there is a deeper message buried there, like in any other good piece of art. But instead of trying to run from the Matrix or fight it I know there is a better way. Building our own Matrix.

Each of us is the Architect.