How I Spend My Attention
mythirdbrain.substack.com
mythirdbrain.substack.com
Turn off the news.
If something is actually important, you'll hear about it anyway. And if you don't hear about it, it wasn't actually as important as the reporters made it out to be.
Plus in all likelihood the events being reported on are thousands of miles away from you and have zero impact on your daily life.
Obviously this pairs well with cutting out all the nonsense on your social media feeds.
After that, try not using your phone at all for 24 hours, laptops/desktops still allowed.
Getting off reddit has been one of the best things in my life. Discord has helped find more positive outlets for me to waste my time.
But lastly, get a hobby that isn't just working on getting better at something. It's cool if you can do like 30 different things, but that's hard. Know your limits and budget screw around time to help unwind.
An awful lot of people do have this idea that you just have to turn the whole thing off, though. And i see a lot of people on Reddit equally incorrectly saying that about Twitter! I wonder why.
/r/askengineers
/r/SEUT
Lots of the fiction and story subreddits, /r/maliciouscompliance is hilarious.
There are multitudes of art and music subreddits, choose your favorite genres.
/r/neutralpolitics is a great heavily moderated subreddit that requires HQ citations for any statements of fact posted.
The diet and fitness subreddits are super supportive and positive.
Tons of artists have their own subreddits, e.g. Swordscomic got its start on Reddit, and still has a really active subreddit.
It's the old question of liking something despite knowing it's (probably) fake: Usually it doesn't hurt, and can in fact mean that literally nobody got hurt.
But there's a general tendency of such content attracting hatred: If it does not explicitly identify itself as fictional, people don't like the idea of it being believed to be true.
While that's good and I'd be okay with this normally, reddit has had a decade of history showing they aren't afraid to generate a new policy to ban certain subreddits just because a minority of vocal losers want it banned.
E.g. Reddit "recommends" popular subreddits, and regularly injects top posts from them into your feed. /r/politics is one of them. Also, a lot of the big subs that you'd think are benign (like /r/science) are filled with blatantly partisan posts that are guaranteed to have hateful comments in them. E.g. There have been dozens of "science" posts there about studies that effectively equate conservatives to religious, science-denying idiots using much more "sciency" words. Even if that's not the intention, the comments inevitably go there, and you're stuck reading very non-science related comments.
Or check out the top posts in /r/cringe or /r/publicfreakout. It's all related to Trump. It just gets so boring, repetitive and predictable.
Reddit has gone out of their minds. They want people to target ads to, not a genuine community of people that care about the content they make. That's why those stickers have gone to absurd levels and they charge ridiculous prices for it. Now when I see a post, gold means nothing anymore. I don't even know whats a worthwhile post to bother reading cause half the time it's garbage group think irrational "the dems are freedom fighters!" stuff anyway.
Plus banning literally everything to cater to the puritanical mommies out there is absurd. Reddit was an interesting place. Now it's kind of like how HN reacts when google creates something new where you go "Wonder how long it'll last before they kill it..."
Carefully pruning your subscribed subreddit list makes Reddit worth it. I still get value from buildapc, homeassistant, patientgamer, ipod, rugbyunion, and some others that concern other interests and hobbies.
I do agree that people shoe-horning Trump into everything is extremely annoying.
Just redditors? All established media...
Not sure this is right. I think Trump has actually just demolished norms at such an astonishing rate that the system can't keep up and things that 10 years would have torpedoed a campaign or a presidency now get forgotten in the 24 Hour shitshow that has been the Trump administration. Remember it wasn't that long ago that Howard Dean blew up his entire presidential campaign just by "screaming" at an event.
Reddit for news is like StackOverflow for programming. If come to either one already knowledgeable in the given area looking for a quick supplement, they are a boon. If you use them as a substitute for knowledge, they are harmful.
But I do agree, my stress goes down when I tune out the news.
I switched from reading a lot of news sites most days to picking the couple sites that I like the best and mostly only reading those. And then I read a few of the truly interesting-seeming articles that bubble up on places like this here website, etc.
Pre-internet, I would only buy one newspaper, and occasionally pick up a second when I was out if there was something eye-catching. I would also occasionally buy a magazine or two at the bookshop once or twice per month. I have tried to emulate this method again with the web, and it seems to be working.
I was never a person who would read every available newspaper and magazine before, so figured maybe I should not do the same online.
I am much happier not to face the firehose anymore.
This approach comes with an obvious sampling bias lurking. I'm not going to tell you not to do it, but it's something to be aware about. That's why I prefer to have my news curated by a small set of organisations that are more diverse and can make me inform myself on a broader set of issues than the ones I would naturally find interesting.
Take for example the US election. I don't think there's much of a difference between watching it live and just waiting for the result.
Unless you're a key player, if you're watching it closely, it's just entertainment.
I've seen a lot of people who decided years ago that they were never voting for Trump spend the last 5 years obsessing daily over every news article about him. None that news is going to change the way they vote. And usually they don't even remember most of the local politicians who are on their ballot. The claim that this is to be an informed voter is usually a justification for a fairly unhealthy addiction.
Are there any tools that help limit bumping into news?
I've also been trying to reduce casual news consumption.
Yes. It's called "RSS".
Read multiple sources, keep yourself on top of things, then sensationalized headlines won't stir your emotions as much.
This makes it much easier.
Look at it like more being curious about what kind of a world we must be in, rather than what you are supposed to feel about it (rather, what they want you to feel about it).
Also when you can plainly identify the calls to emotional action in the headlines, then you're free to ignore it; and can just take away what actual content may or may not be there.
Cutting out all the fluff and focusing on news helped me save time and stress.
It's a common practice to lie[0] in a headline, then correct it in the article. This makes headlines have negative informational value - you're literally more wrong about the world after scrolling quickly through a news page than you would be if you didn't.
--
[0] - Usually by omission or exaggeration, not by outright stating false facts.
Also, that's exactly why I added the clause "or may not be there" :) That's part of the skill when reading headlines - training to see it as a dirty filter and seeing if there are any glints in the dirt that are interesting enough to follow up on.
point taken, however
Ignoring the news, and just expecting the "important" stuff to magically penetrate is a great way to live in wilful ignorance, and/or let people/governments/corporations get away with a lot of bad stuff that others around you have deemed insignificant.
I could probably name half a dozen things off the top of my head that would affect your opinion or behaviour towards various things in your daily life, that you aren't aware of because they aren't considered "important" enough. And I guess if you're okay with indirectly supporting workplace sexual abuse, money laundering, unsustainable work and management abuse, the erosion of civil rights, and destruction of the environments, then sure, I guess it's not important.
Obviously finding a balance is essential, so you can be well informed and reactive, but also not drown in doom. I'll admit: it's a balance I haven't found, but I firmly believe living in a metaphorical hole isn't going to make anything better.
News is entertainment. If you really want to get smarter, read books from people who are experts in their field.
Edit: if you do want to read a book, start with "Trust me, I'm lying". It will give you a whole new perspective on news reporting.
By the time you “hear about it everywhere” because it’s important, it has already been twisted and distorted, and given the party-line spin.
Which is a valid choice, of course - but you should be aware of that, and — if you care about facts rather than narrative - ignore the stuff when you hear about it as well.
The US now has tens of millions of citizens that believe the election was stolen. I think they're mostly just "normal" people who have tuned out and now can't tell which way is up.
The reason I pay attention is because following news daily is actually less cognitive load than trying to catch up when a significant plot twist happens that might impact me.
No. It only means you're using your social networks (both Internet and meatspace ones) as an importance filter. It doesn't mean you have to form your worldview around the first piece of information that reaches you passively. It's about being deliberate about news consumption.
The way I follow the principle is: if I hear about something and it crosses the threshold of importance, I hit multiple different news pages simultaneously, as well as smaller communities, to ingest multiple points of view and hopefully get a relatively low-bias picture of events. But when I don't have a specific important thing to look for, I don't read the news sites at all.
BTW. I gave up on news ~14 years ago, after realizing that following news stories every evening was causing me great amounts of stress. Every day, I felt the country or the world was about to go down in flames. Well, turns out here we are, 14 years later, and nothing of such proportions ever happened.
I'm also reminded of someone on HN (can't remember the handle) who says they're reading the news every day - just not the current news, only one week's old news. Even taking it as a mental experiment is a good reminder that 90%+ of stuff on the news is utterly irrelevant and unimportant.
Remember the McDonalds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_coffee_case ? Everything you'd "just hear about it" without looking into the details would lead you to believe that the US justice system is ridiculous - this case was mocked everywhere (in news, in film, in popular culture) and occasionally still is.
> It doesn't mean you have to form your worldview around the first piece of information that reaches you passively. It's about being deliberate about news consumption.
While you are technically correct, I've personally known many (about 20 or so) people who have stopped reading the news with the "if it's important I'll hear about it" mentality, and all of them except one never bother with active investigations into almost anything. You might be different, but in my experience that would be the outlier among the "I'll hear about it" crowd.
Now, you might also claim that Liebeck vs McDonalds doesn't cross your "threshold of importance". Personally, my own threshold of importance and credibility is constantly re-adjusted based on the differing accounts of actual events.
> just not the current news, only one week's old news.
Well, that's an interesting experiment.
One week might be fine, but I find that e.g. one year is not (e.g. one year in the Assange case it was becoming really hard to get informed about anything other than the US Department of State angle, except if you listened to Alex Jones style people -- which is generally an exercise in futility; whereas while things were happening, there were many angles).
Further, I've noticed how even science history gets whitewashed. Over 20 years, the narrative of the conflict between Linus Pauling and Dan Shechtman went from easy to find descriptions of "Pauling publicly ridiculed and undermined Shechtman with all his scientific weight, and only after Pauling died (and as a result of him no longer fighting against that) was Shechtman's advances to crystalography accepted" to "Pauling had a standard scientific disagreement with Shechtman that was eventually resolved in Shechtman's favor, but that happened only after Pauling died and without any relation to it". Robin Warren and Barbara McClintock had similar stories that have since been whitewashed.
Again, this is over a 20-50 year period, and might not even cross your threshold of "importance", but I know that if I just waited to "hear about it" I wouldn't know anything of these stories, and they do cross my threshold.
EDIT: a word.
The point of not reading regular news is for it to filter out what you hear about, not the specifics of those things. It's hard to put a spin on basic facts like "there was a shooting" or "there was a plane crash". If it's important enough for me to hear about it, I can then decide if it's important enough to warrant actually researching the details of independently.
There are some more niche topics that I maintain an active interest in. Outside of that, I don't see the point in trying to be "informed" about every last thing on the face of the earth.
The past few years have illustrated that following the news is in most cases choosing to believe the corporate spin on an event, because "news" in the US is literally run by enormous corporations that have a vested interest in you believing what they say and coming back for more.
People mean very different things when they say news, I've found. Most of what people think of as "news" is human interest story garbage churned out as quickly as possible to get the most number of eyeballs. This category includes even a lot of supposedly reputable newspapers, unfortunately. This is great if you are looking for lunchtime gossip or just something to distract or entertain yourself with. Not so good if you want to learn something or expand your world view.
The way I see it, good news
- gives historical context,
- dives deeply,
- covers the entire globe,
- discusses incremental changes and not only big events,
- reflects on multiple perspectives,
- doesn't overemphasise human interest stories, and
- provides you with actual data.
Good news, ironically, ages well.
There are still some people that work with real news. There was a recent Ask HN about favourite magazines and journals[1], where some of the comments mentioned The Economist[2] (a long-time favourite of mine) and Delayed Gratification[3] (which I can't personally vouch for but I admire their goal.)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25159931
I live in Cornwall in the UK: much of this stuff is - anger and distaste and "long distance fear" aside - completely irrelevant. I think Trump is appalling, but really, what difference does it make to me? None whatsoever. What difference can I make to whether he's in power or not? None whatsoever. What is net result of me seeing yet more news about how redundant a human being he is? I get cross, depressed, and - as per OP's article - man, I waste a bunch of time I'll never get back.
The problem I've struggled with is that there is presumably a continuum at the end of this "caring less" approach which is the "why bother voting" lassitude, and I certainly don't want to go that way. I'm still passionately left wing, passionate about helping fix inequality and the environment and so on - so news at a higher level is important. But I'm not sure the sort of rapid, breathless, clickbaity HORROR cycle does anything for anyone.
> I'm still passionately left wing, passionate about helping fix inequality and the environment and so on
What's the most effective way to gain information and insight about these topics and ways to contribute? Is it following the breaking news? Probably not. The real problems don't change hourly or daily, and information doesn't go stale. So instead of today's news, it may be better to find books on these topics, as well as recent but not that recent reports, investigative journalism, etc. - things that are not meant to be a part of a daily news cycle.
Solid information from sources like that, and refined beliefs formed thanks to it, will make you a better voter too.
For instance, I never heard of the temporary +0.5% to mortgage refinancing, that lenders will have to pay to federal banks starting Dec 1st, until an article few weeks ago here. This was planned back in June, but now it is too late to act on.
How many hours would you spend watching and fretting about the news to avoid this (and similar) couple thousand dollar “profound effects”? You’d probably be better off learning to change your own brakes or do some other part of home maintenance. Financially, time-wise, and mentally.
But the point is - it is a relatively good example of something, that affects a lot of people.
>> * In this century (and the previous century) we modelled one-to-one communications in the telephone, which I assume we are all familiar with. We have one-to-many communication - boy do we have an awful lot of that; broadcasting, publishing, journalism, etc. - we get information poured at us from all over the place and it's completely indiscriminate as to where it might land. It's curious, but we don't have to go very far back in our history until we find that all the information that reached us was relevant to us and therefore anything that happened, any news, whether it was about something that's actually happened to us, in the next house, or in the next village, within the boundary or within our horizon, it happened in our world and if we reacted to it the world reacted back. It was all relevant to us, so for example, if somebody had a terrible accident we could crowd round and really help. Nowadays, because of the plethora of one-to-many communication we have, if a plane crashes in India we may get terribly anxious about it but our anxiety doesn't have any impact. We're not very well able to distinguish between a terrible emergency that's happened to somebody a world away and something that's happened to someone round the corner. We can't really distinguish between them any more, which is why we get terribly upset by something that has happened to somebody in a soap opera that comes out of Hollywood and maybe less concerned when it's happened to our sister. We've all become twisted and disconnected and it's not surprising that we feel very stressed and alienated in the world because the world impacts on us but we don't impact the world. Then there's many-to-one; we have that, but not very well yet and there's not much of it about. Essentially, our democratic systems are a model of that and though they're not very good, they will improve dramatically. *
Well Douglas Adams is a great writer and all that but this is a massive simplification, at least in the UK [0]. There is an extensive history of public opinion being swayed by highly politicised media, also a lot of state control on what could be said. E.g. salacious gossip about the royals. There was also a lot of graphic media - essentially political cartoons - that were very highly political and intended to inflame opinion.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_journalism_in_the_U...
Suddenly everyone is going to the park.
What if suddenly everyone stops looking at news? Acting and reacting?
What if the stress i get through the news will never be necessary but what if there is another regime and we need everyone being on alert and standing up and knowing whats going on?
Yin and Yang, finding the balance in our generation is not easy. I get that, i see that, i experience it myself but while i'm sometimes ready to not care i'm worried that i might not react correctly anymore when it counts.
My reasoning is this: most of the stuff in the general news is something you can do absolutely nothing about, at most it may influence your choices at election time or best case inform you about a scandal involving some company, letting you avoid doing business with them in the future.
Everything else is just noise that creates anxiety.
BBC and PBS are the only others which I watch besides DW.
Edit: I just downloaded their app and I noticed it has a 'text only' and an 'offline' mode! Truly wonderful!
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.idmedia.an...
What I spend most of my days, weeks and months on is largely unrelated to what's happening in the world (and the news' bias towards the negative subset of that). Not following the news thus removes a lot of the sensationalist and negative stream, and saves a lot of time (including possibly worrying on what I just saw/read). If it's really important, I'll hear it anyway.
Recently, I did start a subscription on a national newspaper though, but it allows me to a) select what I read, b) skip over things I'm not interested in (even throwing away the whole paper if I don't want to read it that day). I happen to like some columnists and the variation of daily puzzles.
It's those little 'hacks' I use to trick myself into managing my emotional state.
After 40 years, I've found that the most effective way to manage myself is to treat myself as a toddler.
Video news in general is worse than talk / text because they can hijack your visual senses to get you worked up.
I used to listen to a lot of NPR. I always told myself they were fair and balanced and couldn't use visuals to deceive me. Over the summer, I realized that they are little better than the liberal version of conservative talk radio. Which is a shame, because I put a lot of faith in them for about a decade.
Local news papers are probably decent at a lot of things, but having known people who interact with reporters for them, local papers tend to be just as biased as anything else. They are, after all, just run by people.
I get most of my "national" news these days through either here on HN or a couple twitter feeds that seem to curate what they retweet pretty well. Local news, my friends and neighbors are plugged in to the community and we experience news in real time.
Honestly, I think for most things, you will get a better understanding of the landscape if you aren't hearing it from people who have a monetary interest in you wanting to come back for more "news" tomorrow.
And on that note, I have cut down on my twitter quite a bit as well lately.
I bet virtually none. The news isn't about you or me. It's about controlling you and me. It's about propaganda.
By passing one hour per day to read news i was able to predict the containment in france and to prepare myself and my familly ...
In some sense, the quoted statement is obviously right.
But in another sense, it's wrong. To cite just one particular example which is dear to my heart because I work closely with school children and students: News about the climate crisis typically originate in some far-away location. But to fight the climate crisis, we have to get organized in every single city, including the city you live in.
Goethe: "If one has not read the newspapers for some months & then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature."
is it me or do a lot of people seem to justify their thirst for mostly pointless and irrelevant information with the idea that all this information will somehow lead to direct action on their particular issue?
I used to listen to a news radio show called Morning Ireland while eating breakfast. That was the first thing to go. A few years later I tuned into it one morning, and they were pretty much saying the exact same stuff as they had been 3 years previously. This encouraged me to continue ignoring it
Shortly afterwards I was having dinner in a friend's house, and related the above, and it turned out one of the other dinner guests was (and still is) one of the presenters on Morning Ireland :/
(he was good-humoured about it, in fairness)
I stopped all unscheduled phone calls except from a “!DND” group for the past many years and I love it. In-fact, when iOS 14 changed the interface for phone calls, I was dumb-founded few times before I realize the tiny notification like thing on the top is the phone reject/accept interface. Anyone can lead a distraction free phone life[1].
I disabled almost all forms of notifications a while back and I’m super happy with that decision. My default when adding any new App/Program to my toolset is to start by turning off notifications[2].
2. https://brajeshwar.com/2014/missing-step-productivity-activi...
And even my immediate family talk to me primarily via chat apps that aren't covered via starred contacts. Therefore I know when my phone makes a sound it is something I need to respond to in a timely manner.
Everything else causes a notifications pulse, with different colours for different apps (purple for a chat app, yellow for work email etc). It's so unobtrusive I don't notice it unless I deliberately look at it.
I'm using Shalimar compostable garbage bags available on Amazon.in. They claim to be CPCB Certified as per IS/ISO 17088:2008 [1].
[1]: https://cpcb.nic.in/openpdffile.php?id=UmVwb3J0RmlsZXMvTmV3S...
I'm curious to see what sorts of patterns will crop up.
I realize the pandemic is temporary but I was amused at the thought of just how useless that feature would be for me at present.
That would be a really neat tool though - I hope it makes an appearance on HN once you get it working.
I do the poor mans version of this:
- Look at all my pictures in chronological order on apple photos.
- Open: http://maps.google.com/locationhistory
- Look at my journal for that day
From all that, I can kind of piece together where I was and what I was doing. I would love one app that does all of this seamlessly.
https://github.com/andrewning/sortphotos
I call it from a batch file that will pull in photos from SD cards. I have a few cameras, and my phone will let me backup photos/video to an SD card. This will organize everything into a folder structure by year/month/day.
python ./sortphotos.py "/Volumes/CANON_DC" "/volumes/Seagate_2019/Photos" -r --keep-duplicates --sort %Y/%b/%d-%b
I have a few lines of these in the batch file, one for each SD card name. So I don't even have to think about the paths. I just put in the SD card and run the batch file to import.
The biggest challenge is to extract stuff from all those data silos. For geolocation, I'm using the excellent OwnTracks, and I plan to write my own receiver to replace the one in Nextcloud. I also extract geolocation from images.
I've been thinking of a similar approach but recording audio of important events in my life instead, with the thought that audio formats might be slightly more stable than video formats. But I'm not sure.
She's super disciplined to make sure she gets one everyday, and it's awesome being able to watch back days, and remember things that you might never have committed to memory. Nice little moments that pass you by.
Highly recommend. We store the end result on some hard drives (locally) and also on google drive. And then they are also uploaded to some hosting sites (I believe Youtube atm).
If only it were true that we have attention under our control. There are so many things we can pay attention to, and so many people whose job it is to distract us, that we can rarely direct it as we want. And biologically, we're set up to be distracted by threats and unexpected phenomena.
That's not to say we don't pay attention. As he points out elsewhere, Csikszentmihalyi identified 'flow', which is when we get into a nice state of focus on something positive.
Luckily, we're finding out more about how to pay attention to things we want to pay attention to. Prioritising, dividing tasks into chunks, getting enough sleep, choosing what we attend to more wisely are all helpful.
As in, the advantages of Substack are clear, but are there any distinct disadvantages to using it as both a blog (exposure, discoverability) and a newsletter (reader retention) at the same time?
Anything about it that limits it in ways in which a standalone blog wouldn't be limited, e.g. analytics?
One thing he noted was his number of readers went up too though (probably due to appearance on #1 nationwide talk show, that promotes the IDW/Dark Enlightenment Movement/"race realism"/ancient aliens Egypt hypothesis, just before he moved though).
I think medium catered to bloggers, and gave a space to post easily, and get some extra viewership through their community.
Substack caters to more prominent writers/bloggers who want to charge for their content, and build a following, and handles the logistics of that.
So maybe something like Patreon and Medium combined
And like Medium, one day Substack too will be filled with inane musings from nobodies and hustle/entreporn content.
The difference is that instead of being designed as a blog with a strong domain ranking and an RSS feed, it's a web page with a strong domain ranking and an email signup interstitial.
"You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times."
Like the other poster said - there are only so many Christmases that are magic.
But to take it further - there are only a finite number of developmental milestones, and your time and energy and attention absolutely have an impact on those milestones (barring a disability or something like that).
For example - our oldest started speaking in (hilariously speech impedimented) full sentences at 12 months. People wondered if he was a genius baby.
No, he's pretty average in terms of raw computing power. We spent an ENORMOUS amount of time with him as a baby, just talking. We narrated everything we did. We spoke to him as a human person, instead of babbling back at him like a lot of people do. We described the steps of everything we did. We explained the reasons for what we were doing as we were doing it.
That focused, invested time had a clear, and definite impact on the child's development.
And that's not even talking about the benefit for our mental health when engaging in a substantive manner with that tiny weirdo.
My 2020 in one sentence.
I'm now at a point where I can realistically start planning for the future again, instead of feeling weighed down by things that should have been finished already.
I was just exaggerating a bit with the sentence for making a joke, but I'm sure this is not my most productive year.
I was on this path already (I already had an MPCNC and woodworking tools) but I'm pretty sure this year gave me a lot more time to play around with stuff, and so I got further.
In terms of news I have a bunch of RSS feeds for my industry and use huginn to do two things:
1. Filter them, to increase signal:noise 2. Set a schedule so that I get a “morning briefing” with industry news.
This way I’m not inundated throughout the day.
I do the same thing with hn and other personally interesting sources, but have those delivered Friday afternoon
I still skim hn (why I’m here now) but mostly looking to see if there is anything I want to comment on. If I see a neat headline I know I can read the details later.
I also read the economist (a weekly) and listen to and read books to stay more generally aware of the world
Getting away from a continuous feed has been really great
This is so true. "Using" instead of "choosing" to use your phone and scrolling endlessly is simply being on autopilot mode. I have all the notifications blocked that saves me a great deal of time.
In this age of political drama, if we choose to spend our time in a more practical way rather than bashing everyone on social media without following that pyramid of "how to debate online" (iirc), there'd be a lot of essential time saved on our sides.
It also says doing a something without being mindful is the same as doing nothing.
The conclusion is:
> What you pay attention to is going to be your life. It's so basic that it hits me.
But at the same time, there are tons of book that promote automation, see Atomic Habits, which makes it clear that good (automated) habits make your life easier and more productive.
So if you spend 50% of your day, doing automated tasks (going to the gym, learning to play the piano, showering, watering the plants, cleaning up your room, etc.) does this mean that you did nothing the entire time?
Also, you can both do an automate task and pay attention to it (be mindful) or think of something else (plan things, dream about stuff, get new ideas, etc.).