Focus is a commodity
For knowledge workers, focus is everything. If you aren’t focused, you probably aren’t getting anything done. At least, not anything of real value. Checking emails? Responding to messages in Slack? Engaging or posting on LinkedIn? Sure, these might help keep the business running, but they are all shallow tasks (unless you are in marketing and LinkedIn is a large part of your job I guess). As an engineer or product person, these things are detrimental to your focus. They are distracting and hold your attention away from more important tasks, namely thinking. It’s difficult for your brain to work on hard problems when you are being constantly bombarded by notifications and new information to consider. By all means, interact with people and gather information from customers, but that needs to be focused time. When you are done, turn it off. Disconnect from the dopamine mill.
So what does this have to do with focus being a commodity? Well, the first paragraph on Wikipedia defines a “commodity” as such:
In economics, a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that specifically has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity
So how could I say that “focus” is a commodity? It isn’t a fungible resource or economic good. Well, maybe not in the traditional sense, but ask any social media platform how important attention is, and I’ll bet it starts to sound like a commodity. Wait, you said “attention”… They are basically the same thing (see the first line for the Wikipedia page for attention, it literally says “or focus”). More importantly, the social media platforms don’t really care who’s attention they have. They just want as much attention and focus as they can get, which makes each individual person’s focus equivalent. The more they have, the more money they can make from advertisements. Therefore, “focus” is a commodity that everyone has, social media platforms want to capture, and advertisers are willing to pay for. If that’s not a commodity, then I don’t know what is.
Great, so what do we do with this newfound information? Well, it’s time to take back your focus, which is honestly not a new concept in 2024. Focus is such a large component of productivity and innovation. Being able to really think about a problem without distractions is a breeding ground for new ideas and unique solutions. However, workplaces aren’t necessarily doing enough to help with that. Sure, plenty of them will block social media from their company-managed computers, but that doesn’t really stop people from using their phones. And even then, that’s just stopping them from doing something, not encouraging them to do something else instead. Many people will rebel against rules and policies, so it is better to redirect their energy rather than restrict it. Regardless, I think we can do better.
I don’t have the perfect solution (yet). It’s just an idea, but it is an idea that has a possible solution. I’ve been working on something for a few months now to help solve a part of this problem for myself. The goal is to help train my brain to put off tasks for a later time. Maybe they’ll get done, or maybe they were just distractions and should be ignored anyway (see the famous Eisenhower four box model). Maybe it was something really important, but didn’t need to be done right in that moment. So without further ado, I’d like to introduce Scrawl It. Scrawl It is a productivity app designed to keep you focused. When you have that random thought, write it down and get back to what you were working on. Sure you could do this with your existing notes app, phone, or even a piece of paper. However, if you are an engineer like me who almost always has his hands on a keyboard, it would be a lot nicer if that was just a keyboard shortcut away (and not one tab among the 50 I always seem to have open). Technically, the keyboard shortcut is a work in progress, because we need to finish the native desktop application, but that feature is coming post-launch in a few weeks.
My co-founder and I would love for you to try it out and let us know what you think. If you enjoy it, let us know what stands out most for you! If you hate it, well hopefully we can change your mind someday. If not, that’s okay too. It may just not work for you and your workflow. We’ve been building it for us because it’s a problem we have and knew we could find a solution for. Hopefully we’ve built something that works for you too.