The finishing piece for my basement office was two leather club chairs. I'm not sure why I have two, as I'm the only person who ever sits down there, but these chairs arrived as a pair. I began sitting in the chair near my desk at the beginning of some workdays. Sitting with your laptop on a club chair isn't a picture of good posture and I can't do it for very long. I didn't buy the chairs to help me focus, but they do. But hunching over a small screen focuses my attention. I can only usefully see one thing at a time. Putting together my to-do list or writing emails or reading, while in the chair, are things I must do one at a time. The opposite is true when I move to the desk. Its giant monitor gives me ample room for the kinds of things that take small slices of my attention.I don't keep the club chair focus up for very long. My neck gets sore. So, eventually, I'll plug into the larger screen and tab back and forth to Slack all day long. I can do certain kinds of work better with a larger screen. It's really helpful to have enough space to see several things at once when I am executing a plan in software or creating a slide deck from extensive notes. But when I'm trying to think or to write or need any kind of unitary focus, having other information present ruins it. It's tough, to pull an example out of the sky, to write and edit a few hundred words of essay-ish material when a glance puts other work, calendar appointments, or direct messages in view. (The inverse is also true: it's tough to be at your appointments on time if your calendar is never in view.)
To focus is an interesting verb. It means direction one's attention at a particular thing. I often remark that I need to focus on something if its coming due soon or, if I'm behind on something, I'll say it's because I haven't focused on it yet. We describe focusing our attention with a whole pile of analogies: it's a muscle, a practice, an art, an ability, a discipline. These all capture aspects of what focus is, but I think the mostly make the bar too high. If we call focus an ability, we give ourselves the excuse of not having it. If it's a muscle, then the excuse becomes not exercising it. I think focus is universal. We all have attention. On what we choose to use it is up to us. Case in point: a top anti-focus culprit is often our phones, but even a day without a phone can bring back our ability to focus.
The first link below, about monotasking, is good review of what it takes to focus. It include the classic stories of artists locking themselves away to work, but also the more prosaic ways to structure your to-do list or your day with an eye towards what you're actually able to focus on and for how long.
You might think this sort of essay would include a caution about the latest computer programs. On the contrary, I've found the chatbots to be very helpful at focusing on multi-step research and decision making. Take, for instance, my project to insulate under some heating elements in my basement ceiling. The goal was to redirect some of the heat those elements produced upwards and I had many options of insulating products and installation methods to pick from. For months, I'd poked around on the internet, in DIY forums and home efficiency blogs, constantly ideating but never doing anything. Last summer, I spun up an educated AI chat, loading in home plans and similar context, and then used it to help me move through research and decision-making. In collecting information, comparing quotes, and ruling out options the chat conversation helped me focus. It helped me make the decisions required to insulate the basement because, over a period of a few weeks, every time I opened the chat, it helped me stop repeating my cycle of dithering and move the thinking forward. Almost relentlessly, every time I interacted with the chatbot, it pushed my thinking on the project forward. It sniffed out my temptation to review previously discarded ideas and reminded me of territory I'd already covered. Even when I changed the decision parameters towards the end of the consideration, to hiring a contractor from doing the job myself, the chatbot reworked the considerations accordingly and spurred me on. It kept me focused.
That's not to say computer programs are always a help to one's focus. They can add complexity of approach and information density out of scale with what we're after. If your attention is focused on learning, the complexity of information technology can easily overwhelm progress towards your objective. The second essay below argues for a simpler, focused approach to learning:
If you wish to start learning better, all you have to do is start reading, writing, and talking about what it is you’re learning, preferably reliant on your own mind alone and with another human.
This rings true. I'd posit that the least learned people right now are the ones feeding raw inputs into a computer program and then pasting its outputs into some artifact. In attempting to outsource the apparent drudgery of knowledge work, it's easy to fall into the trap of outsourcing understanding itself. Reading, talking, and writing—focusing your attention—is the way to learn.
In a world full of distractions, getting your brain to focus on one thing at a time requires radical measures.
An Introduction to the Trivium and First Steps Towards Simplifying the Learning Process