Escaping the Attention Black Hole
AI didn't fix my focus. It gave me an exit.
Everyone talks about attention deficit. Not enough of it, can't hold it, phone keeps stealing it. That's not my worst problem.
My problem is the opposite. In engineering, the silent killer isn't the inability to start, it's the inability to stop. Call it hyperfocus, call it perseveration: when a problem catches, everything else drops. Other work, sleep, conversations. Gone. I don't resurface until either the thing is done, or I am.
I've learned to build guardrails. Social media was the easy one: an algorithmic feed is designed to keep you consuming, never surfacing. No exit by design. That loop has nothing worth losing sleep over, so I mostly stay away.
But work is different. The problem isn't going to solve itself, so I have to dive in. I've tried hard rules, like no work after dinner, to prevent those sleepless nights. But rules only hold until you're three errors deep at 11PM and the fix feels right there.
Here's the thing I kept sacrificing to stay functional: exploration. Not mindless scrolling, but actual cognitive wandering, letting attention drift sideways, follow tangents, consider the adjacent possibilities. That's where most of the interesting things come from: unexpected connections, better questions or simply the solutions you can only reach by first taking a step back. But wandering only works if you don't get lost in it. For me, that was never guaranteed. Once something caught, I tended to follow it all the way down. So I learned to keep a tighter leash on my own curiosity, just to get work done. Guardrails on everything, including the good stuff.
But that has changed with AI. Not that I suddenly became disciplined. But AI has made a lot of those descents shallower, and that has quietly given me something back...
The old research loop used to be: query, ten tabs, three more queries, another page of results, compare sources, slowly build a mental model. Now it's much more often query, read the synthesis, then sources only to dig deeper where it actually matters. And for the technical rabbit holes, the effect is different but just as important. When I hit a gnarly implementation detail, a weird dependency issue, or some cursed edge case, I don't always have to go all the way down myself anymore. A coding agent can take care of that for me.
Which means my attention is freer than it used to be. Not because I suddenly stopped going deep, but because depth no longer swallows me whole.
I'm still figuring out what that actually means for me. But in the middle of last night, attention spinning in the dark, I landed on this: attention isn't binary. It's a dial. You can turn it up for depth, down for breadth. But the part that used to feel impossible: getting my attention back when I need to move on. That’s what actually feels new.
Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time to turn the dial down and step AFK.
PS: the AI might be solving my daytime rabbit holes but at night, trying to sleep, I'm still left alone with my meaty brain, battling random 3AM inspiration spikes! That's rarely enjoyable: tomorrow-me always pays the price. If you've found a way to quiet your brain for the entire night, every night, and without the grogginess the next day, I'm genuinely all ears.
