New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Anyone working on systems to help preserve our attention?
Ask HN: Anyone working on systems to help preserve our attention?
3 by bogdanoff_2 | 0 comments on Hacker News.
It seems like everything these days is trying to steal our attention and increase "engagement" (i.e. addictiveness). Even in the workplace, there's a constant stream of information and distractions. Where I used to work there was 4 different systems I used on a daily basis, each with its own notifications. I'm wondering if anyone (companies, researchers, organizations, individual people, etc...) is working to combat this assault on attention. At the extreme I imagine "algorithms to fight back the algorithms", or "synthetic attention" that filters out and aggregates information for you. Surely, lots of simpler and more pragmatic solutions also exist. Plenty of people at my job did amazing work despite all the distractions. Maybe we could study what these people do and make it easy to do it by default, by integrating it with the company tools. I'm guessing aggregating and holding back notifications and gui updates that aren't related to the task at hand. Or something like an integrated pomodoro timer that would block notifications and instant messages during sprints. Or, imagine a service like Youtube, but instead of maximizing watch-time, it would maximize some definition of satisfaction. Perhaps it would let you enter your goals, like: not watching more than x hours per day or week, unwinding on workday evening, learning or staying up to date on certain topics, encouraging curiosity or creativity, etc... And it would recommend videos that make you feel satisfied after the allotted time, instead of making you mindlessly watching for hours. Or something to help me look over and sort all the articles and videos accumulating in my open tabs... (Just now I heard the sound of a new email and I'm tempted to tab over and look at it...) I feel like helping preserve our attention can have a huge positive impact in today's world. I'd like to know if anyone is working on this problem, and I would myself like to work on this problem.
3 by bogdanoff_2 | 0 comments on Hacker News.
It seems like everything these days is trying to steal our attention and increase "engagement" (i.e. addictiveness). Even in the workplace, there's a constant stream of information and distractions. Where I used to work there was 4 different systems I used on a daily basis, each with its own notifications. I'm wondering if anyone (companies, researchers, organizations, individual people, etc...) is working to combat this assault on attention. At the extreme I imagine "algorithms to fight back the algorithms", or "synthetic attention" that filters out and aggregates information for you. Surely, lots of simpler and more pragmatic solutions also exist. Plenty of people at my job did amazing work despite all the distractions. Maybe we could study what these people do and make it easy to do it by default, by integrating it with the company tools. I'm guessing aggregating and holding back notifications and gui updates that aren't related to the task at hand. Or something like an integrated pomodoro timer that would block notifications and instant messages during sprints. Or, imagine a service like Youtube, but instead of maximizing watch-time, it would maximize some definition of satisfaction. Perhaps it would let you enter your goals, like: not watching more than x hours per day or week, unwinding on workday evening, learning or staying up to date on certain topics, encouraging curiosity or creativity, etc... And it would recommend videos that make you feel satisfied after the allotted time, instead of making you mindlessly watching for hours. Or something to help me look over and sort all the articles and videos accumulating in my open tabs... (Just now I heard the sound of a new email and I'm tempted to tab over and look at it...) I feel like helping preserve our attention can have a huge positive impact in today's world. I'd like to know if anyone is working on this problem, and I would myself like to work on this problem.