This feels so familiar. Since more than a year or so Im witnessing more and more content being produced. One year ago or so it was enough to visit HN main page once a day and be up to day. These day, it needs a visit every few hours, the main page changes constantly. Not only that but also the amount of content received via newsletters.

Worst is with LLMs and coding agents, I give it a task to work on then go browsing the web, the LLM finishes in 2 minutes but I come back after 10…

At the end of the day, my mind feels super tired even though its the LLM that did the heavy lifting. I also barely remember what I was browsing 15 minutes ago. At this point I can honestly say - Im in trouble.

I listened to the dose effect [1] and that has really helped me get my attention back.

I’ve deleted TikTok and now get blocks of focused work done and I haven’t been this effective or happy in years.

I genuinely believe the next generation will be defined by people who can and who cannot focus their attention and get stuff done.

[1] https://open.spotify.com/show/2YCIVADHhUbpTtuCIvV7dG?si=lOiV...

"It feels like my brain finds a way to do something else and avoid painful situations like boredom or hard work."

You just described ADHD.

I do have this problem. Its not caused by my age or mental decline. Its simply too many things happening too fast, to many people asking questions and too many topics to pursue without any pause.

Work, family, life, world around you, all scream „me now, my problem, do this, do that, watch this, listen to that”.

Its exhausting. Humans are not built to be constantly in overdrive. I just want to sit and have peace of mind.

Issue is the moment you hit the breaks - „you lose” sign pops up and well.. you fade away. Maybe its a good thing?

YouTube is really the thing that got me - the thing is it's not bad content, I don't watch slop, I watch quality stuff from interested, passionate individual creators and I could listen to them talk about their interests all day.

It doesn't wreck my day or make me feel anxious or anything, no doom scrolling involved, but it sure can turn into a huge time sink very fast.

I'm in the same boat as OP.

I've learned to realize how many times it's boredom or stress triggering the distraction.

I see also other people struggle as much or worse than I do.

I don’t know if this helps, as kids don’t make it easier BUT they do make you much more aware of how valuable your time is. One free hour as a parent feels like a full free day to someone without kids.

TL;DR get kids.

The standards we set are off: I recently discovered 75 hard, and it's mind-boggling to me that the mental equivalent of "do two separate workouts, 45 minutes each" is "read 10 pages of a non-fiction book."

If it's a physics textbook, sure, that balance makes sense. If it's Atomic Habits (no offense to that book) then 10 pages is just not equivalent.

> I am waiting for something then I go browse the web and I get distracted.

I firmly believe that we've gotten so used to always-at-hand phones/apps that we can no longer handle spending a few minutes doing "nothing". I see this in my teenager.

The OP may or may not struggle with ADHD, but this is something that IMO isn't ADHD but rather a new pervasive trait across our modern society. Everything must be instant now. Emails and now chats must be replied to instantly. Service/delivery must be as instant as possible. No more waiting, no more "doing nothing". We're all operating at high speed, even during our "down time". And for no good reason -- we're just inflicting this on ourselves.

A habit that I've taken up which makes me quite happy and I think solidly helps my focus is working offline.

Some days, I'll set a timer for two hours, and then just work offline for those two hours.

I have most of the documentation for tools I use available offline, I'm a bit math enjoyer so I have like 5GB of maths textbooks/papers to study, and programming offline, especially when you've got docs for everything you use, is not only still doable in the LLM age, but also quite enjoyable :)

Reading the article, basically all of the distractions the author mentions are internet-based (HN, LLMs), so perhaps adopting an offline work habit might help them too :)