---
date: '2024-01-11'
title: 'Your attention is precious'
description: "It's finite, it's exhaustible and it ought to be held close and carefully guarded."
tags:
  - 'development'
  - 'tech'
---

It's finite, it's exhaustible and it ought to be held close and carefully guarded.<!-- excerpt -->[^1]

Lately I've been working on dropping things that demand rather than allow for my attention.

If a site makes too much noise in my feed reader, I'll drop it.

If I've stopped enjoying [a show](https://trakt.tv/shows/the-curse)[^2], a book, a movie or, really, any other media I'll drop it and not feel guilty about doing so. If I've outgrown music or lost interest in it, I'll remove it from my collection.

I'm trying my best to realize when something I've engaged with has become a sunk cost and I can move on from it without feeling guilty.

It's exciting to find new things that interest me but it can also be exciting to recognize that something no longer serves me and I can reclaim the attention I was paying it.

The things that are most insistent on gaining your attention are those least deserving of it.[^3]

Hang out with your family, read a book, read a blog, write a post — don't feel obligated to scroll forever or waste your time on anything that's no longer serving you.

[^1]: Thanks for spending some of it — however little — here!
[^2]: You cannot convince me this is worth going back to.
[^3]: If you send me *one* push notification that's not strictly related to what I've installed your app to do, I'll turn them off. If you hound me to turn them on when I open your app, I'll uninstall it.