Over the past year, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to focus my full attention and concentrate on tasks. I don’t know if this is a result of COVID-19 lockdown, working-from-home all the time, anxiety about careers, growing older, or some deeper cognitive problem.
I figured I could use this post as a way to document the problem and see what can be done about it.
Constant Attention Grabbing
I think a large part of my problem stems from the world we live in now. Everything is constantly fighting for our attention. We’re hyper-connected everywhere we go.
One thing I recently changed was turning off the email notification ding on my phone. I think I’m a happier person now. That ding had me trained to constantly look at my phone to see if something important came in, regardless of present company or time of day.
That’s no way to live.
I could be in face-to-face conversation with friends, hear a ding, and grow uncomfortable the longer it took to check my phone. Who’s in charge of my life? Me or my phone?
When I first received a company phone, I felt obligated to keep it on all the time, answer any time of day, bend my life around being available should anything come up. It’s tiring. I wasn’t technically on-call, but I was expected to answer if someone needed anything. I carried two phones around because I still had a personal one that friends and family would call on.
But today we embrace Bring-Your-Own-Device. Why? I think corporations figured out that we don’t like the feeling of always being on-call and not getting paid for it. It took a few years, but I eventually learned to turn the company phone off once the work day was done. You’ve got to balance out work and life, but our company culture could easily demand 75% of my time. If my work device and personal device are one in the same, I’m forced to keep it on.
We used to receive a generous reimbursement for BYOD, but in 2019 it was cut in half. So now I don’t feel so bad if I miss an email or phone call while I’m out enjoying time with my family. And that’s how I should have been living this whole time: giving my 75% attention to my wife and kids, leaving the 25% for the last minute fire-drills at work.
I’ve only had the ding turned off for a week at this point, so it’s still early to tell how much improvemnt it will bring. I do feel less distracted already.
If it’s business hours, I’m in front of my computer to deal with emails. If it’s after-hours, it better be a phone call or I’m probably not going to see it until later when I happen to glance at my phone. I think that’s fair.
Working From Home
I think everyone can agree that the number of video calls you have to be on now in a work day has exploded. There’s definitely a fatigue that sets in going from one video call right into the next. Nobody leaves time for breaks anymore. I don’t want to sit in front of the computer all day. I want to get up and stretch my legs. Go outside for lunch. Working across multiple timezones makes that incredibly difficult.
As offices have opened back up, it seems like the number of video meetings has ebbed away a bit. I certainly don’t want to see videoconferencing go away completely (that’s part of my livelihood), but I’m glad we seem to be heading back to a manageable number.
Crestron Masters this year was a challenge to sit through. Not only were some of the days long (I had one that started at 8 AM and didn’t wrap until 11 PM), it was a string of back-to-back sessions. By the end of the week I had an incredible headache, even though I tried to get up and move about whenever the opportunity presented itself. And tried to drink lots of water to combat the headache.
I’m sure there are some people who are perfectly happy working from home all the time. Good for them. I think it depends on what your job entails. I like working from home 50% of the time, going to an office space 25% of the time, and going to customer sites 25% of the time. That’s my ideal.
Career Anxiety
I worry that I’m going to be let go if our company changes direction. It’s already pretty divorced from A/V, but there is still enough residual work to keep me around. How much longer? Who’s to say. They don’t seem to be pursuing new opportunities in that area.
And this could be the trend for A/V programmers everywhere. As more services move “into the Cloud,” there’s less opportunity to sell customized solutions. Everybody accepts whatever is baked into the software package offered by Microsoft, Cisco, Google, etc. Even Crestron has pushed “no programming” solutions for a while now. You have to wonder if that is because they’ve lost trust in the industry programmers: they now have to dictate what their equipment can do.
There was a time when innovative solutions were dreamt up and programming brought them to life. Now, everything is cookie-cutter. It’s great for service and maintainability, but it fails the customer when sacrifices are made to squeeze their needs into the same mold.
I still see A/V programming being necessary for a long while still. There are avenues to explore with AV-as-a-Service where controllers are software programs running on AWS or Azure. And humans will still require decent-sized displays and clear audio in shared spaces. As long as we have offices, we’ll have shared spaces.
I guess I shouldn’t worry about my future as an A/V programmer, but I do need to be ready to adapt once more devices become Cloud-connected and programming is deployed that way. The ability to do this is already here, but I haven’t seen it embraced by many vendors yet.
Getting Older
I’m approaching 40. At times I feel like my overall health is better than when I was in my mid-20s, but I do find that mentally I struggle to adopt new thinking now.
I should look into dietary changes to see if anything improves mental clarity. I’ve cut out most junk food from my diet, but I probably don’t eat as many fruits and vegetables as I should. I do try to eat at least 1 piece of fruit every day, usually an apple.
I would definitely benefit from more exercise, too. I need to start building muscle. I’ve slimmed down to 170 lbs, which is about where I’d like to be. I still have some belly fat I’d like to shed, but I’m not really replacing anything with muscle. I should join a gym again.
I’ve wanted to explore yoga or meditation, too. I don’t know how well I could get into meditation unless I find somewhere quiet enough.
How to Improve Your Mind
I’m deeply curious how to regain the mental capacity I feel I’ve lost. Maybe I never had it and I’m fooling myself? I think I should still be able to train my brain just like anything else in my body.
Where do you start? Maybe I should pick out some good podcasts to listen to since that’s low friction?
I don’t want to get sucked into self-help books, but I’m sure there are materials that would help me train myself.
While sometimes I feel dumber than I was at 20, I do at least feel wiser. I can apply my experience to forecast how something is going to turn out (usually poorly!). And I do find new hobbies and experiences to explore, so I know a little more about things like programming, electronics, construction, and cooking that I had no clue about 20 years ago.
What’s Next
I’m going to keep this post open-ended because I think this is a topic that I’ll always come back to with more insight. I can at least keep a record of what I’ve tried, what works, what doesn’t.
This is me curating my Digital Garden.