14 published lessons with this tag.
You wake each day with a limited reservoir of focused attention — roughly three to four hours of genuine deep work — that depletes with every act of sustained concentration and cannot be refilled by willpower alone.
Every moment you spend attending to one thing is a moment you cannot spend attending to anything else. Where you direct attention is the most consequential decision you make, and you are making it constantly — whether you realize it or not.
Doing one thing at a time produces better results faster than switching between tasks.
Your attention goes where your intention already pointed it. Decide what to focus on before you start, and your perceptual system reorganizes around that decision — filtering, prioritizing, and surfacing what matters while suppressing what does not.
Physical and digital environments either support or undermine your focus.
Every notification you allow is an attention tax — audit ruthlessly.
Unfinished tasks leave attention residue that degrades focus on subsequent tasks.
When genuinely curious you focus effortlessly — use this as a task design principle.
Setting a fixed time limit for a task sharpens focus within that window.
Meditation is direct practice at noticing where attention goes and redirecting it.
Extended focus needs environmental rituals and structural support to sustain. You cannot will yourself into deep work any more than you can will yourself into sleep — you have to construct the conditions that make it inevitable.
Reserve low-attention tasks for times when deep focus is not available.
Chronic attention splitting creates a deficit that manifests as exhaustion and poor judgment.
The ability to direct and sustain attention underlies every other cognitive capability.