how do you stay focused when your work is boring and something interesting is only a few clicks away?

kind of a weird question incoming

if your brain relies on stimulation to retain focus

how do you make your work life “stimulating” enough to have your brain prioritize focus of it over all distractions (texting people, watching youtube/insta/tiktok videos (informational to deranged))

this question is tangentially related to the gen z thing people say “romanticize your life”

i’ve found i can’t really trick my brain into anything. If there’s something really boring i have to do for work, there’s no mind game under the sun I can use to get me to do it over watching an RMTransit video or something on geopolitics

yesterday I went to another doctor (as one does) and when I got back at 1pm ish to my unit, I watched videos for the whole rest of the day until like 8pm when I noticed some escalation and helped out and paged people

it’s basically the same PR that I’ve been procrastinating about all week, and partially I’m procrastinating because there are so many other people involved and the protobufs are full of things i’m supposed to ignore, also some people pushed to my branch and I’m going to have to understand their code*

in light of that environment, my brain just aimlessly fell into youtube and I learned about the history of nyc chinatown and chicago and dc and why china made 60,000 km of subway in less than 10 years (extreme standardization) and why hk mrt is so good and sg mrt and history of tky and cdmx and etc

highly recommend this channel Bright Trip they have super dense succinct documentaries on city’s histories

when I was in high school I came up with like 20 different ideas for how to make my tedious study life “interesting” and I would earnestly try them all on myself to “trick” myself into being interested in studying above all other things and basically the only one that work kind of work sometimes was when I imagined myself as an emotionless rational agent who always does the most important things first

this kind of worked but if i did it enough times in a row i would get bored because it’s really hard to remove the emotion of boredom from your brain once it gets in there

so yeah I’m at a loss lmao; i don’t want to have more days where I do virtually nothing but aside from guilt and fear of firing I don’t have many tools to prevent them from happening

sort of related: one of my teammates (younger than me) used to say oh this will be fun (unironic) when we were discussing project requirements and they were getting more complicated. I’m super envious of him because I think his brain genuinely enjoys when things at work become a tangled mess to untangle whereas for me when that happens my brain wants to disassociate

btw regarding the photo:

Found the original photographer of this photo. His name is Crazy Ivory, and the photo is named, "sick fearless bastard". This was taken on one of his friends balcony in Santiago, Chile in the middle of the night with a Canon EOS 40D + Canon 18-55mm He even has a small summary of how they got the photo, I'll post it underneath "I took this in the middle of the night on Ed and Frans balcony. I loved both of the cats, but they were incredibly suicidal all the time. They actually fought and chased each other on this railing, and as you can see its pretty damn fucking high. My heart always skipped a beat when I saw them doing this, but Ed told me its OK. loco gatos potones!" -Crazy Ivory

Originally published on Substack. View the source version ↗