How to defend your attention and find a flow state (Ep. 410)
This week we chat about the forces vying for your attention and how developers can fight back against distractions and get into more productive, focused flow states.
The inspiration for today’s episode was a terrific article from The Guardian about the many ways in which the modern world, specifically the software we use every day, was designed to steal our attention.
During the episode, we discuss Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor know as the “father of flow” for his pioneering research on flow states. Sadly, Prof. Csikszentmihalyi passed away in 2021, but you can find a terrific tribute to him and his work here.
In the second half of the episode, we discuss “The California Ideology” and the ways in which hustle culture and libertarian ideals helped to shape Silicon Valley and the world of technology more broadly.
Congrats to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, UrbanoJVR, who answered the question: What is the difference between ‘mvn verify’ vs ‘mvn test’?
Tags: the stack overflow podcast
6 Comments
Insightful and inspirational. I have quit social media for a long time.
You really like the word “terrific” apparently.
When I was growing up my family spent 2 months every summer on an island with no roads, no bridge to it, no TV or telephone, not even a radio. There was electricity for the stove and refrigerator, but no central air or heat. We bathed in the lake and used an outhouse. For 2 months. At night we read books or sometimes played board games. No one else I know can imagine doing this. But it is a lot like what Hari did, and that was all of my summers growing up. There were usually no other kids around. My brothers and I would walk in the woods and build tree forts and things. Imagine anyone doing that now? (This was 4 or 5 decades ago)
Yes, I can imagine this very well, in Africa.
I’ve quit social media as well.
I couldn’t understand how someone went to a good size city like Providence, RI to find isolation, as described in the podcast, until I read the original article and saw that it was actually Provincetown, MA, which makes a LOT more sense. Folks would be better off reading the original article than wasting a dozen minutes listening to a poor verbal rehashing of it. I want my 12 minutes back!
But the link to the Guardian article was great! Thanks for that.