On Threads: Attention Management in the AI Era

For years I tried to save time. I batched my email, automated what I could, declined the meetings that had no reason to exist. I guarded my calendar like it was the thing that mattered. And the days still came up short.

What I had wrong was the unit. Everyone gets the same twenty-four hours, so time was never really the thing I was running out of. I was running out of attention. Some mornings I sit down with a lot of it. After bad sleep or a stretch of too many open problems, I sit down with almost none, and no amount of free time on the calendar puts it back.

So the question is not how many hours I have. It is where the attention goes.

Single file

For most of my working life the answer was: one thing at a time, in a line. I'd start a task and ride it to the end before I could pick up the next. Switching cost me something every time. I could hand work to other people, but the back and forth to keep them pointed the right way often ate whatever the help saved.

So work took the front of the line and got most of the attention. Family got what was left after. The projects I actually wanted to build sat at the back and mostly never came up. I'd told myself that was just how it went.

Working alongside the machine

When I work with AI now it doesn't feel like the line anymore. I hand off a piece, describe what I'm after, and go do something else while it runs. When I come back there's a draft sitting there. It's rough, it needs me to read it against what I meant, but it's hours of work I didn't have to grind through to get a starting point.

The attention I would have spent grinding is the thing that gets freed. Not for more work. For the calls that actually need me to decide, for sitting with my family without half of me still chewing on a problem, for the writing I keep meaning to do.

The day stops being one long push from start to finish. I set direction, hand off the execution, come back and fix what's wrong, set the next thing going. It moves in a different rhythm. I notice I'm less worn down by the end of it.

What it frees up

I'm more present at home now. Not because I work fewer hours, though sometimes I do. Because when I'm with my family there isn't a process still running in the back of my head, turning over work I left open. That part got handed off.

The work is better too, which surprised me. When I'm spending attention on the decisions that need my judgment instead of scattering it across the busywork, the decisions come out sharper. I'm not depleted by the time I reach them.

It isn't doing less. It's putting the attention where it counts and letting the rest run in parallel.

The trade is different now

The old trade was straight: more work, less life, more ambition, more given up. The line moved one way.

The new one isn't even. A little attention spent up front, getting the handoff set up right, frees a lot of attention later. A small fixed cost for an outsized return. I've seen that shape before, in the risk systems I've built for navigating uncertainty, where a small defined cost can buy a large occasional gain, and where the right structure gets stronger under pressure instead of weaker.

It works the same way here. When the demands pile up, I lean harder on the handoff, run more in parallel, and keep the part that needs me for the part that actually needs me. None of it is free. Building the context, learning where to trust the machine and where not to, that takes real work. But it's work that pays back instead of draining.

What I'm still not sure about

I'm not handing anyone a finished system. This is something I'm living inside of, still testing.

There are places it doesn't hold. Some work can't be handed off. Some of it needs me there the whole way through, present, no parallel track to run. I don't know yet where all those edges are.

And there are real costs I can see coming. Skills I'm not using anymore going soft. Leaning on systems I don't own. Maybe losing something that was in the labor itself, the part where doing the slow work taught me the thing.

What it means to spend attention well is an old question. I don't have the answer. But when I ask where the attention is going instead of where the hours are going, the choices get easier to see, and easier to make on purpose.

In the evenings now, more often than not, I'm actually there. Not running tomorrow in the back of my head. Just there, with the people I love.

On Threads: Where Attention Should Go