This Thursday, I flew Indigo from Singapore to Chennai. I had no WiFi and got a lot of (slightly difficult) reading done, such as:
- Machines of Loving Grace
- Against the Personal Theory of Agents
- Paul Graham’s The Top Idea in Your Mind
- How I Built the Most AI-Pilled Company in the World
- Catching up on Simon Willison’s blog
- Actions from a long pending book cluster summary (The Beginning of Infinity, Conjectures and Refutations, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, The Fabric of Reality, and Enlightenment Now).
- Several tweets, blog posts, and ChatGPT / Claude chats.
- I also drafted prompts to run later.
In a disconnected flight, I’m less distracted because:
- I don’t need to check on whether an agent completed.
- I can’t open Hacker News if an essay is hard to read.
- I can’t click on a link in the essay.
That forces me to absorb harder stuff.
Last Thursday, I flew Emirates from Brussels to Dubai. I had good (free) WiFi on the flight. Strangely, I still got a lot of things done:
- Created an Asterix browser
- Created a comic story using real faces
- Ran an agent-swarm experiment
- Improved video embedding on my blog
- Published a few blog posts
It’s a different kind of productivity - doing rather than understanding - but still felt more productive. I think that’s because:
- I didn’t have any meetings - unlike typical weekdays.
- I can’t snack or watch TV - unlike typical holidays.
I tried this by sitting in libraries, at office on holidays, at cafes and client offices. It’s not the same. There’s something about the forced “You can’t get up for 7 hours” that makes me a bit more productive.
Your mileage may vary. But for me, flights are productive. I thought it was because there was no WiFi but it may be because I can’t get up.
A day later, I watched myself as I got distracted. Here’s what I noticed.
- When tasks are running in parallel, I get distracted. “What still running? Did it complete?”
- Grouping all live tasks into a bucket - e.g. a tab group - helps. I’m peaceful there’s one place I can go check.
- Hiding the live task list helps - e.g. the browser vertical tab list and VS Code terminals. It’s more work to check what’s running.
- When something updates on the screen, I get distracted. “What’s that?”
- Turning off things that update the screen helps, e.g. live sessions, notifications, even the running icons in browser tab / VS Code terminal titles
- Two screens have more distraction opportunities than one.
When do I get distracted?
- When I get ideas (meetings, reading news), I get distracted. That’s a good thing - but I need to complete them and that requires delegation, prioritization, etc.
- After finishing something (submitting a prompt, committing code), I get distracted. That’s a good thing - there’s no point waiting for an agent to complete, usually.
- While doing other things (exercise, TV, brushing teeth, etc.) I get distracted. Up to a point, that’s OK.
- When work is hard (complex, boring), I get distracted. That’s a bad thing - and precisely when I need to focus.
This is not structurally different from my fairly detailed experiments in 2022-23. I haven’t consciously applied those learnings to AI agents, I guess.
Worth practicing.