Do One Thing at a Time - Jackson Dahl

Published August 14, 2024. The more present I am, the more fulfilled I tend to be. Happiness is easy, they say: be here now. So why is it so hard to stay here? As I groggily opened Twitter this morning, the beginning of a thread stared me in the face: "I'm addicted to focus," it began, above some diagram of a brain scan. I thankfully came to my senses and force-quit the app most responsible for my scattered mind. But that phrase lingered in my head this morning. It's pithy, but somehow probably right: if we are not addicted to focus then we must at least have an unsatiated desire for it. Our language about presence--focus, flow states, embodiment, on and on--all seems to point to something radically simple: doing one thing at a time. Unfortunately, I spend much of my time actively trying to do multiple things at once, let alone intentionally settling into a single-minded focus. Our contexts, culture, and technology tend to encourage or demand a buzzing, high-variance approach to atten

Published August 14, 2024. The more present I am, the more fulfilled I tend to be. Happiness is easy, they say: be here now. So why is it so hard to stay here? As I groggily opened Twitter this morning, the beginning of a thread stared me in the face: "I'm addicted to focus," it began, above some diagram of a brain scan. I thankfully came to my senses and force-quit the app most responsible for my scattered mind. But that phrase lingered in my head this morning. It's pithy, but somehow probably right: if we are not addicted to focus then we must at least have an unsatiated desire for it. Our l