Regain Your Focus with Attention Blocking
You’ve wanted to start that thing (a project, a skill, a dream) for months, maybe years.
You think about it often. You daydream about how it would feel. Friends have even cheered you on.
Yet nothing happens.
You tell yourself you don’t have time. There’s work and family. Also, the list of issues that will magically clear up “once that other thing is fixed.” But when that other thing is fixed, another one pops up. And still the project waits.
Meanwhile you’ve tried every productivity trick you can find:
Pomodoro timers help for a week.
Calendar time-blocking falls apart after a few days.
A new focus app gathers digital dust.
They help at first, but inevitably you fade away.
And late at night, tired from the day, you tell yourself you’ll just scroll TikTok for a few minutes, watch a quick Netflix episode, or play a short game.
Before you know it, you’ve spent four hours binging shows, doomscrolling, or grinding SoloQ, and now you’re frustrated and wide awake.
So is lack of time really the problem?
Time Is Potential, Attention Is Power
People say time is our greatest resource because it’s limited. But time alone creates nothing.
We all share the same 24 hours, yet some people turn them into art, businesses, or championships while others watch them dissolve into distraction.
The difference is attention.
Time is a flowing river and attention is the paddle that steers your boat. Drift without it and the current carries you anywhere, leaving hours to blur into half-finished thoughts and forgotten intentions.
Use it with purpose and you can learn, build, create, and evolve, guiding yourself toward places truly worth reaching.
Attention is the force that shapes your life.
It decides whether an hour becomes a memory, a skill, a relationship, or just another forgettable scroll or soloQ game.
The real question isn’t “How much time do I have?”
It’s “Where will I put my attention today?”
Your Attention Is Being Mined Through a Brain Glitch
This isn’t news, but it’s worth a reminder: our attention has become the most valuable resource of the digital age.
Tech giants know it, and their entire business model is built on capturing and selling that focus. Every ‘free’ service such as social media, streaming platforms, news sites, even many computer games profits only when it keeps you watching.
These companies design for addiction across every device you own:
Infinite scroll and endless feeds keep you chasing the next post.
Autoplay launches the next video or game round before you can stop.
Notifications and achievement badges deliver unpredictable rewards, the same psychological principle that makes slot machines a multibillion-dollar business.
Personalized algorithms quickly learn exactly what will keep you clicking or playing. TikTok perfected the formula, and now every platform copies it.
It started on the phone, but it didn’t stay there. The same attention traps now live in desktop apps, PC and console games, streaming services, and online communities.
The goal is always the same: keep you engaged for as long as possible so they can earn as much as possible.
It’s so extreme that in 2017 the Netflix CEO said they don’t compete with other apps. They compete with sleep.
Why We’re Easy Targets
Our own brains make us vulnerable. We’re wired to avoid discomfort: boredom, anxiety, restlessness, frustration. Screens of every kind offer the fastest escape.
Each notification, level-up, or new headline delivers a tiny burst of dopamine, reinforcing the habit and training the brain to crave the next hit.
Long-term, that cycle rewires the mind:
Shortened attention span: Neural pathways adapt to rapid, high-stimulus input, making sustained focus feel uncomfortable.
Weakened reward system: The brain starts to need stronger or more frequent novelty to trigger the same dopamine response.
Lower tolerance for discomfort: Escaping unpleasant feelings trains the brain to avoid them, making everyday stress or boredom harder to handle.
Restlessness in quiet moments: Calm that once felt natural starts to feel uneasy or empty, prompting the urge to reach for a screen.
We don’t just choose distraction anymore, we need it to avoid feelings we haven’t learned to sit with. And the more we do it, the stronger the habit gets.
TL;DR: Tech giants pay brilliant engineers to exploit a glitch in our brains so they get richer while our attention spans get wrecked.
Sounds like game over, right?
Attention Blocking to the Rescue
Here’s a simple idea you don’t hear about much: attention blocking.
Over the years it’s been my favorite tool for protecting focus and cutting through the noise when everything feels distracting. It’s also been a big part of my success in several high-performance fields.
Attention blocking is the deliberate habit of shutting the door on anything that tries to steal your focus.
Picture your mind like an apartment with a dozen doors open: phone notifications, Discord messages, random thoughts, people dropping by, ads flashing in the background. Attention blocking is gently closing every door except the one leading to what you actually care about.
It’s about protecting a clear, quiet mental space so the time you already have actually counts.
Time blocking puts something on a calendar; attention blocking protects the quality of the moments inside it.
Why It Matters: The Science Explained
Even the tiniest interruption leaves a bigger dent than you’d guess, and research backs it up:
Attention residue: When you jump from one task to another, part of your mind stays glued to the previous thing, like a heavy app still running in the background.
People who were interrupted took up to 50% longer to complete tasks and made twice as many errors compared with those who worked straight through.
Switching costs: Each mental gear shift takes a few minutes before you’re fully engaged again. Studies show it takes an average of 20 minutes to return to full focus after a single interruption, even if that interruption lasted only a few seconds.
Ego depletion: Every time you resist the itch to check your phone or “just peek” at Twitter, you drain a bit of your willpower. Experiments show that people who spent time resisting temptation performed about 20% worse on later tasks requiring concentration.
A single glance at a Discord ping can start the whole chain: you break focus (switching cost), your mind keeps chewing on that message (attention residue), and the effort to pull yourself back wears you out (ego depletion).
The end result? Your brain does more work while you get less done.
The “Brain Rot” Is Real
When constant pings and micro-distractions become the soundtrack of daily life, your brain starts craving novelty like a kid craves candy. Each notification or quick swipe delivers a tiny dopamine hit, training you to chase quick rewards instead of deep focus.
Short-form content like TikTok, Instagram Reels, endless YouTube shorts, and late-night doomscrolling only crank this up. Bingeing whole Netflix seasons or grinding through endless SoloQ games teaches your mind to surf from one spike of excitement to the next instead of settling into slow, focused work.
Over time, staying with a single task feels genuinely uncomfortable, like holding your breath underwater. The erosion is so gradual you barely notice until sustained concentration feels almost impossible.
Attention blocking is the way back.
By deliberately shutting out constant inputs, you give your brain a chance to relearn steady focus. The kind that lets you design, write, learn, or perform at a high level.
How to Use Attention Blocking
Here’s how to make it work, starting with big-picture mindsets and finishing with concrete actions you can use today.
Big-Picture Mindsets
1. Goal Alignment
Attention blocking is most powerful when it protects what truly matters to you.
Ask yourself: If my attention sets the direction of my life, where do I want it to point today?
Pick one or two long-term priorities like learning a skill, improving health, or mastering a craft, and schedule attention blocks for them first.
Keep a small note nearby and jot down every unplanned distraction. Review it at the end of the day to see where your focus leaked.
2. System Design
Don’t rely on willpower. Shape your environment so focus happens by default.
Create “focus zones” with no phones or open tabs.
Use apps that block distracting sites or set Wi-Fi to cut off during key work windows.
Share your schedule with friends or teammates so they know when not to interrupt.
3. Neuro Training for Mastery
Focus is like a muscle: the more you train it, the stronger it gets.
Check your baseline: notice how long you can stay on a task before drifting.
Start small and add 10 minutes of full concentration each week until 60–90 minutes feels natural.
Schedule regular study or skill sessions and aim to stay fully absorbed.
Take deliberate breaks between sessions away from screens so your “focus muscle” can recover and grow.
Tactics by Difficulty
You don’t have to overhaul your life overnight. Start with small wins and build from there.
Begin by focusing on what matters, building your focus muscle, and setting up an environment that makes it easy to stay on track.
Then layer in the tactics that feel doable right now. Before long, deep focus stops feeling like a chore and starts feeling natural.
Ready to begin? Here are three levels of tactics (easy, mid, and hard) so you can pick the one that fits your life right now.
Easy → Quick Wins
Low effort, instant payoff.
Phone out of reach: Leave it in another room for 30–60 minutes.
Single-task goal: Before each session, write one clear target like “Draft the intro paragraph,” “Review two slides,” or “Watch a VOD focusing on macro.”
Focus cue: Use the same playlist or noise-canceling headphones to signal focus time.
Clean desk and browser: Keep only the tools and tabs needed for the task.
Mid → Lifestyle Adjustments
Takes planning but builds lasting habits.
Scheduled input fast: Set a daily two-hour block with no messages or social media.
Deep-work blocks: Reserve multi-hour sessions each week for key projects.
Shared focus window: Coordinate with coworkers or family so everyone respects a common quiet time.
Mindful breaks: After each block, take a short walk or breathing session away from screens before switching tasks.
Hard → Maximum Focus, Maximum Reward
Big changes with transformative results.
Long-term input fast: Quit an entire category such as social media, news, or gaming for weeks or months.
Extended continuity: Immerse yourself in one major pursuit for weeks or months with minimal context switching, such as writing a book or training for a tournament.
Environment overhaul: Create a dedicated focus room or remove entertainment devices from your workspace.
Quarterly sabbatical: Take a few days each quarter completely offline to reset and recharge.
My Own Path with Attention Blocking
You might ask, “Luis, do you really live like this? Are you trying to turn us into high-performance monks?”
My honest answer: yes and no.
If you want to reach places few people reach, there’s always a price. Either you grind for decades or you learn to use your attention more efficiently.
I don’t practice every tactic all the time. It depends on what I’m aiming for and how stressful life feels.
Storm phases: When life gets chaotic, I let more distractions in because they help me cope. My focus is on surviving the storm, not maximizing output.
Push phases: When I’m chasing something big like starting my poker career, coaching Fnatic, scaling Dygma, I protect my attention fiercely and cut almost all noise.
Here’s another truth: we’re always battling the biggest tech companies for control of our minds. I sometimes lose for a while, but then I reset and create new limits to take my attention back.
Over the years I’ve made and remade some bold cuts to protect my focus, each with a clear reason:
20 years ago: Walked away from news and television and ditched Reddit to stop feeding on endless negativity and outrage. I’ve been out of the news loop ever since.
15 years ago: Dropped heavy consumerism for minimalism, giving away most of what I owned to free up mental space and energy.
5 years ago: Deleted every computer and phone game to avoid their addictive pull, reinstalling only during rare “storm phases” when I need a brief escape.
3 years ago: Quit all short-form social media to escape the dopamine drip and reclaim long stretches of calm focus.
1 year ago: Stripped my phone to the essentials, removing app icons and setting strict time limits, even trying a black-and-white screen so it stays a tool instead of a constant temptation.
And I keep pruning. Whenever something new starts stealing my time, I pause, ask if it adds real value, and cut it if it doesn’t.
Right now I’m in a deliberate attention reset, doing a heavy input fast.
I’m one month into a zero-content experiment: no social media, YouTube, Netflix, podcasts, articles, or even books. The only exceptions are a shared show at lunch and dinner with my girlfriend and a nightly NBA podcast to help me wind down.
The result?
It’s been challenging, but I feel more creative, energized, calm, and happier than I have in a long time.
Closing Thoughts: Living with Attention as the Central Force
If there’s one idea to carry from this article, it’s that conscious attention is the rarest, most valuable resource we have.
Time is just potential. Without attention, hours decay into nothing.
Attention turns potential into progress, whether that means building a company, creating art, or simply being present with people you love.
Attention is also an emotional skill.
It asks us to stay with discomfort instead of escaping into endless distraction and novelty.
And it’s cultural: the way a team or family protects or wastes collective focus shapes everything they can accomplish together.
Attention blocking isn’t about cutting out everything that makes life fun. It’s about making sure the things that bring a quick burst of joy (games, shows, endless scrolling) don’t quietly take over and leave you feeling empty later.
It’s about awareness and choice, not perfection.
What matters is recognizing that your attention is your life.
Guard it when you need to create. Loosen it when you need to relax. But never hand it over by default, especially not to the apps and companies built to capture it.
Time is potential. Attention is power. It’s the true measure of a life well lived. Use it with intention.