spring 2024
Catching Up
Fly Casting Class in Golden Gate Park
In March, around my birthday, I convinced Emily to join me for a free fly casting class in Golden Gate Park.
The Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club is the largest fly fishing club in the world and is located just a mile from our house. Each 2nd Saturday of the month they host free casting classes of all levels for the community. We spent a couple hours learning and practicing the Rollout cast and the Pick Up and Lay Down cast alongside other beginners.
I can safely say that experience casting a bait-caster or spinner reel does not translate to casting a fly-rod. However, getting stuck in trees seems to be universal to all casting.
Mariah the Scientist Concert in Downtown SF
Wednesday, March 13, Em and I saw Mariah the Scientist perform at the Regency Ballroom in downtown San Francisco. It was the smallest concert we’ve been to in a while, a venue with mostly standing room and a small wrap-around balcony with a few rows of seating.
We weren’t prepared to wait through 3 openers and should have just shown up an hour and a half late to see only Mariah. The next day our joints and feet were sore from just standing so long.
Even so, Mariah put on a great show and sounded amazing despite dealing with a cough. We would love to see her perform in her hometown of Atlanta one day when we’re back in the south.
Check out her songs Beetlejuice, Bout Mine, and 77 Degrees.
Kitts SF Visit
We enjoyed hosting Emily’s parents last April for their 3rd Bay Area visit. In the past we have taken trips to Sonoma and Big Sur, toured Alcatraz and the Botanical Garden, hiked in Muir Woods, and explored Oakland, but there is always more to do here.
Dining in Chinatown and Sausalito, hiking Tomales Point in Point Reyes National Seashore, and watching our first Giants game at Oracle Park highlighted this visit.
Check out some photos from Spring 2024
Thinking Deeper
The Attention Matrix – A Personal Framework for Intentional Living
Attention spans are shrinking, or at least they seem to be. Most of us have heard about the study that claims the average human attention span is now less than that of a goldfish. Other studies, like those conducted by Gloria Marks reported in Attention Span, suggest that our attention spans have been shrinking at a concerning pace in the digital age, especially since the rise of smartphones. Some of these studies have been thoroughly debunked (sound fishy?), and others only consider very specific and limited definitions of attention. There is still plenty of room for debate on what all these studies really mean for our individual and collective attention spans.
Science is slow to draw conclusions and should be, but if you are like me, at some point you have been working on a difficult task—writing an important email, finishing up a homework assignment, drafting a report for work—and your mind keeps wandering off, usually to your buzzing phone or maybe that Netflix show you want to get back to binging. Your work takes three to four times as long as it should, or you completely abandon it after checking a text on your phone and scrolling aimlessly on TikTok for an hour.
Around 2018, I began noticing these moments more and more often. Frustrated, I began to recognize all the different cues that stole my attention from the task at hand and pulled me towards Twitter, Pinterest, and Digg which all at least felt more informative and productive than Instagram and Facebook. Around the same time I stumbled onto Deep Work by Cal Newport and started thinking more seriously about personal productivity and time management. I started building skills and implementing habits to help me focus with intention. Years later, directing my attention is still an ongoing challenge, and I have been reading and thinking about it a lot.
The broader concept of attention spans many scientific and philosophical fields, but I just wanted a practical understanding that would help me in the real world. With that goal in mind, I developed a simple framework I call ‘The Attention Matrix’. If you are familiar with the Eisenhower Matrix then you can imagine this as a slight variation which deals with attention management instead of task management, really two related concepts.
You could go down quite the rabbit hole on what ‘Attention’ means with resources like this: Stanford Philosophy Intro to Attention. However, I will just stick to a loose and pragmatic definition for my framework. I will consider ‘Attention’ to be the combination of our cognitive awareness and perceptual filtering. This may be voluntarily or involuntarily directed and may be active or passive, with active requiring more effort to sustain focus. Attention is often broken into categories of Focused, Sustained, Selective, Alternating, and Divided. The matrix applies to all of these except maybe Divided which should be mostly avoided anyway.
Now for the matrix.
| Attention Type | Voluntary | Involuntary |
|---|---|---|
| Active | 1. Intense concentration on cognitively or physically demanding tasks. This is sustainable focus that progresses balanced life goals. | 2. Also defined by intense concentration, but the duration is not controlled. Interferes with balanced life goals |
| Passive | 3. Deliberate focus on cognitively light and restorative pastimes. Replenishes cognitive resources and makes room for creativity. | 4. Can be thought of as distractions. Undermine rest, add stress, and limit progress. |
Remember the earlier example of checking a text message and accidentally losing an hour to social media? This represents the Involuntary and Passive quadrant of the matrix. This could also be spending six hours binging a Netflix show when you meant to watch one episode and had other plans for your time. My guess is that this state is very much a problem of modernity. I can’t imagine most humans before the age of knowledge work really had the ‘luxury’ of being able to spend so much time in mindless consumption. Sure people read books, but I don’t know that employers or teachers had to deal with books the way they now have to deal with smartphone addiction.
Not much better but often overlooked is the Involuntary and Active quadrant (2) which usually involves losing yourself in some difficult task and spending much more time on it than you intended. For example, you blow through lunch and the time your prescheduled workout trying to solve some frustrating but non-urgent problem at work. More on this later.
Then there is the Passive and Voluntary quadrant which includes two subcategories. The first is Entertainment. To live in Quadrant 3, it must hold our attention and adhere to clear start and stop times. Watching a football game or a TV show (even binging the show if that was your intention) are a couple examples. This even includes social media if the time is spent with intention and doesn’t affect your ability to do other things you want or need to do. This quadrant is important because we need rest and restoration after long periods of intense focus in Quadrant 1. Even if we control our focused time well, we will still burn out if we are only forcing our minds to focus on difficult things all the time. I’m not saying we all need to crash in front of the TV every night for four hours, just that entertainment is fine if it’s used with intention. This takes us to the second subcategory of Quadrant 3: Boredom. Our brains need to relax and spend time in the default mode, which can be accomplished by building periods of rest and non-focus into our days when we aren’t consuming ANY INFORMATION originating outside our own heads. According to Gloria Marks, rote activity like cleaning or laundry is a great way to do this. So is achieving flow in some hobby or simply walking. The key is that you are not listening to music or podcasts, reading, or watching anything. You have to let your thoughts flow of their own accord while actually letting your mind be slightly distracted by low-level physical work.
Active and Voluntary is probably the most important quadrant. This intentional direction of attention towards cognitively difficult tasks is what allows us to accomplish great things. It’s essential for learning and completing high quality work and includes many forms of quality time engaging with other human beings. Unfortunately, this category suffers the most from our modern troubles with attention. Our brains our wired to seek newness, so how can writing a technical report compete with the dopamine-fueled thrill of finding the next Tweet to send you into 3 hours of righteous rage?
Some of this seems pretty obvious. We all want to use our time well and avoid distractions. Nothing new there. But the matrix let’s us call out two important but often overlooked aspects of attention. One, a mindset of relentless productivity and a lack of self-control can easily push us into Quadrant 2 where we spend way too much time single-mindedly hammering away at one project. The occasional afternoon may get away from us, but consistently falling into this trap leads to burnout and severely detracts from other important parts of our lives like relationships and health.
The matrix also shines a spotlight on Quadrant 3, about which the productivity-minded among us may often forget. We need time and activities that restore our cognitive energy. Part of this can be television or social media in controlled amounts, but really we should think of this category as hobbies of passive appreciation. I think it’s important
Why does any of this matter? Simply put, our time, energy, and lives on earth are finite, so I want to be more intentional with them. As Oliver Burkman argues in Four Thousand Weeks, there is no meaning without finitude. It is the limitation of time that gives purpose to how we choose to spend it. This means pursuing more time in Quadrants 1 and 3, states of voluntary active and passive attention, and cutting out the rest. I will devote more time to the question of why I believe this is important later on, but for now just know that I do. If you find any of this interesting, call me during my phone hours to chat or text/email me to set up another time so we can discuss it!
And if you want to know more about this newsletter, just check out the idea issue.