The focus tax

I keep seeing the same pattern. Smart people struggling to retain mental context.

Not because they're less capable, because the environment makes it impossible.

It feels like people's biological RAM has shrunk. You can see it in meetings. Someone presents a complex technical problem. Three people check their phones. Two are half-writing a Slack response. One person is actually listening but they're thinking about the last meeting, not this one. Nobody's holding the full context.

They're sampling it, checking in periodically, catching the highlights. Then wondering why the decision doesn't make sense two weeks later.

We did this to ourselves. We built tools that let you be in five conversations simultaneously, respond to emails while on a call, check Twitter between compile cycles. The technology enabled infinite context-switching. So we started context-switching infinitely. We mistake activity for productivity.

Never have I ever solved difficult challenges without long, uninterrupted sessions of deep work. Not once.

The hard problems require you to load the entire thing into your head. Keep it there. Think about it. Turn it over. See the patterns. You can't do that in twenty-minute chunks between Slack notifications.

AI lets you delegate the thinking. Summarize this problem, propose solutions, explain tradeoffs. You never have to hold the complexity yourself. Or you can use AI to clear the shallow work that fragments your attention.

Most people are using it for the first thing. They should be using it for the second.

You can see it everywhere. People who can't maintain context anymore. They need everything re-explained. Background repeated. Decisions justified again because they weren't really present when the decision was made.

This is about habits. If your default mode is partial attention, you lose the ability to give full attention. Stop using it, it disappears.

Protecting uninterrupted time matters more than any tool. Long sessions where you're actually thinking about one hard thing. Focus is becoming the rarest skill on the planet.

Not talent, not intelligence, not even domain expertise. The ability to channel your attention for an extended period of time into one useful thing.

Everything else is trainable. Focus is a choice you make every day, every hour, sometimes every minute. And the default choice is distraction.

The path of least resistance is checking the notification, opening the tab, seeing what's new. Our environments are optimized for interruption. You have to actively resist. Close the browser. Turn off notifications. Tell people you're unavailable.

Protect the time.

Most knowledge workers spend entire days without a single hour of uninterrupted thought. They're reactive. Responding to whoever shouted loudest. Putting out fires. Managing their inbox. Then they wonder why the strategic work never gets done.

It's essentially forced up-skilling. You either learn to protect your attention or you become a human API, converting requests into responses with no original thought in between. Resist it too much and it will be much harder than planting a seed of curiosity and allowing yourself to adapt.

Feels now that an open mind and the ability to focus will be the way to secure future knowledge work for humans. Not just one or the other. Both.

You need the open mind to accept that the tools are changing how work gets done. And you need the focus to do work that actually matters.