Notes on Attention in a Noisy Decade

Attention is the only budget that never grows. We spent a month tracking where ours went, and the answer was mostly tabs.

We keep a running document of things that went wrong on past projects. It is not a list of failures so much as a list of warnings, and we read it before every kickoff.

The finished piece rarely looks like the plan. That is fine; the plan was only there to get us started.

The part nobody mentions

Deadlines help, but only when they are real. A deadline that everyone knows will slip is just a date on a calendar.

Small improvements compound. A page that loads a little faster, a heading that reads a little clearer, and a form with one fewer field all add up.

Taking notes by hand is slower, and that is the point. The friction forces you to decide what matters before you write it down.

Good tools disappear. The ones we keep are the ones we stop noticing, because they do exactly what we expect every single time.

• Write the ending before the middle
• Cut the first paragraph and see if anything is lost
• Read it aloud once, slowly
• Sleep on it before you publish

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

Harold Abelson, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Feedback lands better when it describes the effect rather than the fix. “I lost track here” is more useful than “move this paragraph”.

Good tools disappear. The ones we keep are the ones we stop noticing, because they do exactly what we expect every single time.

Deadlines help, but only when they are real. A deadline that everyone knows will slip is just a date on a calendar.