Distracted Enough To Focus

06 Apr, 2026

Productivity-focused psychological nirvana goes by "flow", "deep work", or "locking in".

Problematically, the things that make a task easy to focus on tend to not come together:

• appropriately calibrated difficulty
• clear goals with immediate feedback
• inherent reward

Anything structured to be a clear feedback loop, which is also fun, tends to be way too easy. Moreover, in pursuit of service to The Man, there are often tasks that are trivial and unrewarding despite being clear and feedbackful.

One of Csikszentmihalyi's original suggestions in Flow¹ was to select the right task difficulty. I argue for the complement - handicap myself to match the task with some background stimulus.

How does one select the appropriate secondary stimulus? I present the cognitive ballast theory of picking shit to do while I do shit.

Filling the Ballast Tank

I feel like my brain has a capacity budget. If the task doesn't fill it up, surplus capacity becomes a distractable liability. In order to prevent that surplus capacity from destabilizing, I need to pick some ballast that will fill my brain back up to about full usage.

If I feel steam beginning to spout out of my ears performing the object level task, then the only appropriate accompaniment is stillness and silence.

What about hard tasks that are just easy enough to allow distraction? Some repetitive physical activity is great here: slow shadowboxing, swinging a racket, passively stretching. Melodic low-tempo music without vocals has also worked.

How to accompany activities that bore me out of my mind? Excessively overproduced vocals and instrumentals like gangsta rap or mainstream pop in any language fills the gap. Bonus: put on mildly educational podcasts or videos for double productivity.

Not Too Much Dopamine

Ideally cognitive ballast should provide orthogonal amusement to the task at hand. For me, getting into a flow state requires clearing some threshold dopamine level. Especially in the bootstrapping stage before flow, I need free happy in brain.

Some tested interventions of generic background noise at 70 decibels² or walking on a treadmill facing a blank wall³ just ain't it. Music I enjoy works better than algorithmically generated white noise or sine waves, and practicing sports movements is usually better than an absent-minded walk.

A risk of choosing something too fun is that it takes over as the primary task! Counterpoint: a friend has played the same iPad game for fifteen years as their primary form of cognitive ballast. I suspect he is the best player in the world but he can easily hold a conversation while tapping away.

Colliding modalities are also no good. Mumble rap doesn't work great for writing coherent blog posts and it's tough to distract myself by walking around if my hand needs to move a spatula.

Claude Ate My Ballast

I realize that my ballast usage has gone down by roughly in order of magnitude over the past few years. I only accompany physical tasks with secondary stimuli.

There's vanishingly little activity left to ballast when low-grade intellectual tasks can be compressed and intensified with LLM assistance.

Perhaps we are the last generation of Lo-Fi Hip-Hop connoisseurs.