Focus

What People Think It Means

The ability to sustain attention on chosen tasks while filtering out distractions. Focused people concentrate intensely, scattered people can't stick with anything. You should be able to summon focus through effort or mindset improvement.

This is moralized because it makes attention management an individual responsibility, ignoring that modern environments are explicitly engineered to hijack attention. Hundreds of engineers at Facebook, YouTube, TikTok are specifically optimizing for attention capture. Blaming individuals for poor focus protects the attention-extraction industries.

What It Actually Is

Focus is what it looks like when working memory capacity is allocated to a single task thread instead of split across multiple threads, in an environment designed to remove competing attention-capture signals.

The Mechanism

  1. Your working memory can hold about 4-7 items at once
  2. Each context switch partially flushes working memory and requires reload time
  3. Each competing stimulus generates an attention-capture signal that your prefrontal cortex has to inhibit
  4. Inhibition costs cognitive resources, which deplete over time
  5. Modern tech is designed to generate maximum-salience attention capture signals

"Distraction" Isn't Moral Failure

It's your brain correctly responding to stimuli that generate stronger capture signals than your target task.

You're not weak for checking your phone, your phone is engineered by teams of experts specifically to override your attention systems.

Trying to outfocus modern distraction tech through pure willpower is like trying to outrun a car. You're bringing an individual solution to a systemic problem.

How to Build It

Engineer the attention system instead of trying to force concentration through effort.

Remove Distraction Sources from Environment

  • Phone in different room (not just silenced – removed)
  • Internet blocked during work sessions
  • Notifications disabled entirely

Don't rely on restraint, rely on inaccessibility.

Structure Tasks to Match Attention Cycles

  • 90-minute deep work blocks with recovery periods
  • 25-minute pomodoros for lower-intensity work

Respect the refractory period – you can't sustain focus continuously, you need recovery cycles.

Use Environmental Cues as Focus Triggers

  • Specific location (library not bedroom)
  • Specific audio (same album every time)
  • Specific ritual (10-minute braindump before work)

After enough repetitions, the cue automatically loads focus_state (see State Machines).

If the Task Feels Impossible to Focus On

Either:

  1. It exceeds your current cognitive capacity (break into smaller units)
  2. It has low inherent value (your brain correctly deprioritizes it)

Don't fight your attention system, debug what it's telling you.

Build "Focus Mode" as a System State

When activated:

  • Phone → drawer
  • Browser blockers → enabled
  • Workspace → specific configuration

Bundle all the environmental modifications into a single state transition.

Track Context Switches Explicitly

Each switch costs cognitive resources and reload time.

Minimize switches through:

  • Batching
  • Scheduling communication windows
  • Single-threading work

Make Focus the Default

By removing distraction access points rather than resisting them continuously.

Architecture beats willpower every time.

Key Principle

Architecture over resistance – Remove distraction sources from environment rather than continuously fighting attention-capture signals.