Weapons of Mass Distraction
The hope and idea behind this post is to help you claw back 1-3+ hours of time by minimizing distractions and another few hours by optimizing things you do manually.
The theme here is your environment and processes should direct your attention in a way that serves YOU - not your apps, devices, and big tech. Without recurring effort.
We’re living in The Attention Economy. In other breaking news, the sky is blue. As a proxy plutocracy democracy, refereeing or at least having some rules in the venues of competition for a society’s mind share is critical to favorable outcomes. Don’t worry, we won’t be driving down Philosophy lane in this post. The most effective way to gain attention share is, of course, money - enter the advertising industry and its’ impacts:
Economic - it’s now the primary driver of revenue and social sentiment.
Cognitive - our population’s ability to focus, mental health, and fatigue.
Ethical - manipulation, privacy, long-term societal effects and trajectory.
The “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (Latin: Who guards the guards) meme is real because the guards are Google, Microsoft, and Meta plus their subsidiaries. The government’s closest rival for effective intervention is “acts of God” (in insurance policies this means natural events beyond human control, like earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and other extreme weather conditions). Basically, we’re uninsured.
Why this matters to YOU
The average person is bombarded with 80-95 notifications per day. Poorly timed notifications destroy productivity. A disruption takes approximately 15-20 minutes to fully ramp back up from and re-focus on a task. The vast majority of us are operating in a constantly distracted state, leading to lower output and higher stress / burnout.
Defined and highly automated processes for most things in life like chores, laundry, cooking, house upkeep, exercise, hygiene, and rest are a massive advantage. How we manage and guard our attention is critical to how much we are able to allocate to things that matter (if you don’t have a clear priority list of them, you should).
The primary challenge in optimizing our signal to noise ratios lies in concise, mostly automated processes which ensure we are apprised of things that matter without having to comb through things that don’t. A traditional solution is hiring a competent personal assistant. So what do we do if that is not an option for us? Enter one of the use cases which AI is already ready for and very capable of. Let’s talk about tools!
Top Picks for Useful Tools
Our evaluation criteria prioritize tools which are autonomous, or nearly autonomous, and deliver a high ratio of “value provided” to “user interaction time required”. Tools that can do this and integrate with your existing toolkit (Zoom, Email, Slack, etc - especially effective mobile tools) are crème de la crème. This is what we’ll focus on.
Foreword: this GPT which, while not perfect, is a great start.
Mandatory: Noise Reduction
Use iOS. You’ve already got it. Go to “Settings”, scroll down to any install App, click on it, go to “Notifications” and properly configure whether you want its’ notifications on your Lock Screen, Notification Center and Banners. This is an underrated feature. Set only critical notifications to show on your Lock Screen. Some apps, turn off entirely. Especially social media. Almost always set “Notification Grouping” to “by App”.
Next, set up “Work” and “Personal” Focus modes (Swipe down from the top right). Another massively underrated feature is Emergency Bypass. On any contact, go to “Info”, then “Edit”, then click on “Ringtone” and “Text Tone” and set a call and / or text tone. This will let you hear from the 1-5 people you actually give a sh*t about while appropriately shutting out the rest of the world to focus on what matters most.
General Purpose
The idea is to keep our overall toolchain minimal by using what we already have.
We have perfectly capable phones and most of us don’t use them alongside our laptops or desktops. Whether you want to make yourself a note while in a meeting or working, use voice dictation. Notta Mobile is a great start. Google Docs has it too.
You probably use Zoom. They have a feature to automatically take notes in your meetings and save them on the web cloud interface (which is underrated too) and then email you a copy. You can forward these into Confluence (the AI features of which are getting decent pretty fast), or Notion. We absolutely love Notion. Use it.
The thing about Notion is that it connects to Slack, which is a great all in one interface for your entire company when used together with something like Notion. Between Notion Integrations and Slack Integrations, you can minimize your company’s signal to noise and enable everyone to get by with excellent tooling from only two places.
Slack Workflows are powerful and save you and your people a lot of time, while also making sure balls don’t get dropped on the tedious and repetitive tasks / processes. This will also reduce employee burnout and stress by minimizing things they dislike.
For Engineers
MS CoPilot for IDE and Fig AI for Terminal are auto-picks. Runner up: Devin AI (Meh)
Everything Else
A decent way to keep taps on what’s out there is Find My AI Tool. Don’t be like this:
DALL-E really needs more work. On the other hand, OAI SORA is pretty great. Yes, I have access. More on that in a future post once embargos and restrictions get lifted.