Context Switching
Some Thoughts on Focusing Effectively
Context switching is moving from one mental setting to another. If you’re debugging code and your friend shows you a video of their dog catching a snowball, that’s context switching. When you’re trying to focus, it sucks because it takes time to get into a flow state, and switching contexts for just a few minutes can sometimes throw you off for much longer. We will examine a few causes and types of context switching and discuss ways to deal with them.
External Distractions
Being in the vicinity of friends can be distracting in two ways. Firstly (and worstly), friends can actively distract you, forcing you out of your context by bothering you when you’re trying to focus.1 Secondly, simply being in the vicinity of friends activates background processes that prime you for social interaction.2 These background processes take up space in your working memory (or RAM to extend the computer metaphor) that would otherwise be available to store whatever variables you need for the task at hand. Hence, it’s not even necessary for your friends to distract you for them to be distracting. For clarification, a “background process” is any mental subroutine that slips under your system 2’s radar. (i.e., a process that you do not detect consciously.) The types of background processes I’m referring to involve empathy and-or stress.3
Isolation. There are three ways to deal with the problem of being in the vicinity of distracting friends. The first is isolation. Isolation works sometimes. When you isolate yourself from distracting humans, your empathy processes are not running, enabling you to sink deeper into focus. However, most students study together because they find it hard to stay isolated for too long without feeling blue. That’s why if you want to use your cerebrum effectively, it’s essential to sustain happiness for hours on end without any human stimulation. According to Thich Nhat Hanh, one way to do this is to build a little home for yourself inside of your heart.4 I’ve tried this, and it’s finicky, but it works! Some days, after practising this and feeling good, I become so engrossed in what I’m doing that I forget to eat, and when I look up, it’s dark outside.5
Filtering. Another approach is to get good at efficiently filtering out distracting input or minimising the load of the background processes. The chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin overcame finger tapping sounds from cunning opponents by studying and practising chess while blasting heavy metal on max volume—in so doing, he was able to desensitise himself to distracting sounds. I’ve tried this with only limited success, and it’s had some undesirable effects: some of my friends think I’m a workaholic because they walk in and see me concentrating, and they talk to me, but I ignore them. (sorry, friends :( )
Music. Finally, some people listen to music while focusing. The thinking here is that the mental processes involved in listening to music over-power other background processes, like empathy or stress, and that listening to music is less distracting than those other ones. I find it harder to get into a flow state while listening to music than in silence, but everyone is different.
Cognitive Overhead
Getting into flow is hard enough without dealing with all the cognitive overhead of being an adult. You have deadlines; you need to eat and wash the dishes, deal with drama or heartbreak, get food, pay rent, etc. If you have dependents, that might double or triple the logistical overhead you have.
I’ve discovered that being broke and jobless is unpleasant. It’s not because I have to rely on my friends’ generosity for a mattress to sleep on, nor is it because I can’t buy nice things. It’s because of the stress it creates in my body; a nagging voice telling me I ought to be looking for a job keeps pulling me out of context.
Any high-octane city dweller who’s ever tried to meditate can tell you that as soon as you stop doing anything and pay attention to what’s going on in your mind, your thoughts start to do strange things. It can feel as though there’s a little machine inside your brain trying to pull you out of your context, playing tug of war with your system 2.
This little machine is a personification of restlessness. The Buddhists say that being restless or worried gets in the way of thinking clearly; they call restlessness a “hindrance”. Having troubling thoughts is my most common pitfall. It’s for this reason that Buddhists advocate only focusing on one thing at a time, no matter what you’re doing; even when you’re on the toilet, you shouldn’t be scrolling your phone.6 The thinking is that falling into the bad habit of multitasking all the time makes your mind distracted, which gets in the way of clear thinking.
The Gentle Way
Rookie judokas commonly waste energy on unnecessary movements. They can be thrown and pinned down to exhaustion by more experienced fighters below their weight class because they don’t spend their resources wisely.
The Japanese word for Judo (柔道) means “gentle way”. An effective Judoka will use their opponent’s weight, impulses, and violence against them. If your opponent lunges forward to attack, you step out of the way and trip them or throw them using their momentum. If your opponent’s weight is unevenly distributed on each foot, you attack the leg with more weight on it—the supporting pillar. If you’re grappling (groundwork), you pin your opponent by applying weight on their sternum, exactly where it will be most challenging for them to move. If someone is pinning you down, don’t flail any which way; escaping requires intelligent use of finite stamina.
Observing college students during finals season is a hobby of mine. Some of them do all sorts of strange, unnecessary, or counterproductive things when they’re trying to focus, just like noob Judokas. Some snack obsessively (I do that too when I’m stressed.) Some have the jits and are constantly adjusting their headphones or seating positions. Others will get entirely distracted by the slightest thing their friend says. These are all symptoms of not focusing well because of stress.
Being stressed makes you worse at thinking clearly, but most (hard-working) students rely on stress to drive them to work. If that sounds like you, the only way to improve is by figuring out how to study without extrinsic motivation. I’ve been out of school for nine months now, and I’ve noticed that going to school gave me some bad habits: namely, struggling to execute tasks that are not required of me by a higher authority. I’m willing to bet that many students would not be able to complete their assignments without a carrot and stick to guide them. In other words, going to school might teach you to get things done, but it doesn’t teach you to focus well when you’re not under pressure. The Buddhists have a term for staying relaxed while remaining sharp. They call it “one-pointedness” (or “the unification of the mind on its object”.)
News
I’m in Montreal now.
I finished my Recurse Center half-batch on Friday. It was a wonderful six weeks of virtual un-bootcamp. I’m grateful to have met and pair-programmed with some great computer nerds and all-around lovely people. I look forward to doing it again as soon as I have the means!
Grateful CLI. I released my first rust crate last week. It’s a command-line interface (CLI) that enables you to keep track of what you’re grateful for throughout the day. Even though I put far more effort into other stuff, this little tool that I wrote in a couple of days is the one I’m proudest of because people are actually using it!–it’s already gotten (almost) 100 downloads! (That’s a lot for me.)
Pet project. Currently, my pet project is improving the Rust Ising model library. I’m trying to take advantage of Rust’s language features (traits and custom types) to make the measurement and simulation methods easy to implement across different graph structures. This functionality would improve the current ‘ising-lib’, which is restricted to square lattices in its current form.
In other news. I submitted an essay on Kurt Vonnegut’s prose to Scott Alexander’s book-review competition. I’ll publish that essay on my website next time I update it. I’m not sure if it’s good enough, rationalist enough, or topical enough for Scott Alexander, but I thought I might as well submit something.
And I’m stuck on Project Euler’s problem 51. It’s bumming me out because it’s only a 15% difficulty problem, but I’ve been stuck on it for days, and it’s consumed hours and hours of my life. I thought I had found a brilliant solution at first, but it took me some time to implement it in Rust, and then it failed… so I re-implemented it three times slightly differently, peppered it with print statements, it still didn’t give me the correct answer. Then I got fed up and implemented a less-optimised solution in python, which I ran in the background for a few hours… it gave me a different answer… but it was still wrong! Ugh.
I spend the bulk of my days researching and doing cold outreach to startups, researchers, and potential collaborators. I’m also excited about applying to interact.
Thanks for your feedback on the first draft Raffi, Marley!
“One of Thomas Mann’s more censorious biographers, noting that the German master’s children used to stare, silent and awestruck, at the closed door of their father’s study, invokes that closed door as a symbol of Mann’s self-absorbed and narcissistic mind. This is unfair. Only writers, it seems, are expected to beg forgiveness for having a time-consuming job. “Ask a doctor to be a doctor two hours a day,” John Irving snaps. “Your friends and family,” says David Bradley, “may honestly want you to do what you want to do, but they also want you to do what they want you to do. They want you to do things for them. Worse, they want you to do things with them—go to lunch, go for a drink, go to the movies. They may accept it if you say you don’t have time for a while, but they’ll want to know how long it’s going to be. They will probably not accept the answer a writer has to give: It may be quite a while. In fact, it may be forever.”
– Excerpt from Stephen Koch. “The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop.”
In Sartre’s way of thinking, I grasp the Other’s look at the very centre of my act as the solidification and alienation of my own possibilities. In fear or in anxious or prudent anticipation, I perceive that these possibilities which I am and which are the condition of my transcendence are given also to another, given as about to be transcended in turn by his own possibilities. I don’t understand Sartre much, but I think there is some overlap with what I’m trying to get at.
There is a caveat: if you collaborate with someone, your interactions can be productive too, but many-body systems are beyond the scope of this essay.
I’m not going to go into this here because there’s so much to say about it, but if you want to know more, follow this link (it’s the same one as above.)
CGP Grey has a good video on how to maintain happiness in isolation.
Buddhist monks are always practising this. No matter what they do, they focus on one thing. Meals are eaten in silence so that they can laser focus on the taste and texture of the food they’re eating. I stayed at a Shaolin temple for a week once. The Shaolin fighting monks practice focusing on a single object by doing crazy workouts and endurance training. The idea is to focus on our muscles and ligaments while pushing themselves to the edge of their ability. In this way, it’s immediately apparent if your focus slips.