Paying attention

What a week. I’ve been sick for much of the week (physically so, some sort of respiratory fun, though, with waves hands at the news, feeling sick in various other ways, too), oscillating between “hmm, I think I’m well enough to do some work from home” and “oh no, I am not well enough, time for another nap”. On the mend, slowly, but a good reminder that these things can come along at any time, and put you out for longer than you’d hope—another vote for building resilience into, well, anything we can. (One example of resilience? Living in partnership. Thank you, T, for taking such great care of me this week.)

That’s led to a fair bit of reading and thinking, though. Let’s meander together.

Attention

Craig Mod’s most recent Roden dove in, out, and back in to the subject of attention (and social media). He linked also to a 2017 essay of his on reclaiming attention. A few choice quotes, weaving the two together:

Does it feel like the last ten years were especially tough for holding onto control of your attention? As if the mass “weaponizations” of attention monsters is only growing? … And so burying your head in a mobile game consisting of popping colorful blobs pacifies a weary soul? And that walking through a subways station is a chance to inhale yet another few Reels? And an escalator — no longer primarily a machine of conveyance, but an opening for another few seconds to blob-pop rather than look around and ponder the majesty of The Mezzanine?

“All our best minds went to be quants,” the saying used to go twenty years ago. Now they opt-into being paper-cut-assaulted by randos, and aren’t even getting paid.

⁠There is a qualitative and quantitative difference between a day that begins with a little exercise, a book, meditation, a good meal, a thoughtful walk, and the start of a day that begins with a smartphone in bed.

Attention is a muscle. It must be exercised. Though, attention is duplicitous — it doesn’t feel like a muscle. And exercising it doesn’t result in an appreciably healthier looking body. But it does result in a sense of grounding, feeling rational, control of your emotions — a healthy mind. Our measuring sticks for life tend to be optimized for material things, things easy to count. Houses, cars, husbands, babies, dollar bills. Attention is immaterial, difficult to track.

We deserve our attention.

These resonated with me this week, as empty non-napping hours stretched before me. What to do to rest when you’ve a battered body but an otherwise active mind? (Asking “what should I do to rest” is perhaps a tell, but bear with me.)

At first, I turned to the unending feeds—scrolling, skimming, refreshing, scanning the headlines to see if any had changed. But I quickly felt that unpleasant feeling doing so brings up in me. Plus, giving more time to any of these platforms, complicit as they are in enabling and obeying a dangerous politics, didn’t feel like the best.

I turned also to my RSS feeds (setup: Feedbin for syncing, NetNewsWire for reading, Pinboard for bookmarking, Readwise Reader for long-form reading / bookmarking). I subscribe to looooots of folks on RSS, but adopted a new habit this week of marking “read” anything I had read or didn’t intend to read. This made the “today” page in NetNewsWire much more useful, because, combined with the “unread” filter, the feed had an end: at a certain point, I’d read or discarded everything from my feeds in the last 24 hours.

I was done (for now). And it felt so good.

Unlike Craig, I struggle to fully step aside from those streams and feeds for long chunks of time. I admire his discipline in doing so, but am not there these days. (I also admire past and maybe future versions of myself who did that more readily, while accepting me for where I’m at today!) This, though, felt like a decent middleground: a way to enjoy the range of voices, and to indulge in a bit of that feed dopamine, while also having a clear end; once the unreads were read, it felt so much easier to put the phone down.

Rest assured, I didn’t spend all my time on devices—or even the majority of it. Instead, I read a good chunk of Menewood, the sequel to Hild, which last year I said should have the subtitle “The Power of Paying Attention”. Reading any book for an extended period of time feels like a prayer at the altar of attention, but especially a book like this. Hild’s character lives the values of paying attention, listening, and questioning.

Government contracting

Waldo Jaquith published four pithy posts on government software development and contracting this week: “Explaining the risk of major software projects”, “Why government software costs hundreds of millions of dollars”, “The Frankenstein of Theseus”, and ‘“Customized COTS”: When government demands to be lied to’. All worth your time, though I particularly appreciated the visuals in the first and the rules of thumb in the last.

In chatting these posts through with Sean, we talked a bit about cost recovery and government teams offering whole-of-government utility services. Services like GC Notify and GC Forms [disclaimer: neither Sean nor I work for the Canadian Digital Service anymore!] are offered freely to fellow government teams, which helps with adoption. These services definitely aren’t free—competent, talented folks are paid a good wage, and appropriately so—but they’re essentially paid for centrally, with benefits to any government team that uses them. There’s an intuitive value to this, but it can be hard to reliably calculate the true economic value. (Though I know good folks are doing so!)

Another model comes from the City of Ottawa’s waste management contracting, where Ottawa’s in-house collection team competes against the private sector. This provides an interesting set of data for pricing and calculating cost avoidance. As the article notes, yes, the in-house team operates at a deficit, but that cost would be greater if they’d contracted it out entirely: “When it comes to the east zone, the city likes to combine the operation results with the costs avoided by not having to select the next-closest private-sector bidder, based on the 2011 contract competition.” So, no, waste management is not a “profitable” service for the city—but it’s an essential one, as many public services are, and not everything that’s essential is profitable.

Varia

• In Sameer’s latest newsletter, he shares his relief at stepping back from a managerial role to an individual contributor role. As I ponder career questions, this harmonized nicely with some of my thinking.
• Sameer also puts into words something I’ve been thinking, too: ‘I think I should just have a “read Mandy Brown” corner in my regular weekend reading posts because she has knocked it out of the park again’. For me, this week, it was Mandy’s annotation on Sara Hendren’s reflection on choice throughout our lives.
• “Last Boys at the Beginning of History”, by Mana Afsari, shares vignettes of and conversations with some of the young men (not, it seems, in short pants) enthusiastically participating in America’s modern conservative MAGA movement. Some of the most cutting observations, though, are about modern liberalism—well worth a read. (via Alan Jacobs and Sara Hendren)
• Meanwhile, adrienne maree brown offers her notes from a recent organizing call—practical, ground-level thoughts on “making meaning, getting concrete and moving forward”.
• How do browsers work? Web Browser Engineering teaches you, by teaching you to make a browser (via Robin Sloan)
• I’ve been slowly watching a five-part documentary on the construction of a medieval castle, using 13th-century techniques (via Jason Kottke). It’s been tickling a lot of interests because of the great carpentry and woodworking on display, but also mentally inhabiting Hild’s world while reading Menewood. (I struggle to watch videos, let alone long-form ones—Readwise Reader has great YouTube handling, tracking your watch position and autoscrolling the transcript, which you can highlight as you watch. Brilliant stuff.)

Being sick, apparently, means longer newsletters. Whether that’s because I’m writing more or editing less, who’s to say. Instead, I’ll just say, thank you, as always, for reading, and all the best for the week ahead.

Lucas