Focus is not a subscription

January 9, 2026 · 1338 words · 7 min read

The productivity complex is selling snake oil, and they're absolutely brilliant at it.

Over the holidays I had a little more free time than usual, so I drifted back into the product management communities I used to frequent. Started asking questions and answering a few others, sharing how I actually work, talked about practices and tools and aired out the messy existence of my day job. A few DMs rolled in with a specific question, but I also noticed the same question everywhere, in various forms. In replies to my posts. In separate threads. Everywhere. You'd see questions like "how do you focus?", or "how do you stay productive?", sometimes with little artifacts attached, like screenshots, Notion templates packed with projects, to-do lists or calendars filled with meaningless items that make you anxious just looking at them.

Also, I need to clear the air about somethin. I'm not a productivity person, or ever have been, and the whole "productivity" industry makes my skin crawl. I've have not had this problem, and focus has never been my daily war (though I'm as flawed a human being as the next one).

I also don't think avoiding this pitfall makes me any better, but it does make me the wrong messenger. And yet, since I see people actively struggling and constantly asking these questions everywhere, here's what I see from the outside looking in. The productivity complex is selling snake oil, and they're absolutely brilliant at selling it. They found a pain point that everyone ran into at some point, feeling overwhelmed. Then they packaged it as a configuration problem. Can't concentrate? You just need a better workflow, better tags, a prettier dashboard. This is comforting as hell because configuring feels like progress without requiring the risk of actual progress. That's the genius of the scam.

Every streak counter, every pomodoro timer, every "capture flow" is designed to trap you in a loop. The loop feels productive, looks productive, but produces almost nothing because it rewards maintenance over contact with the actual work we do.

When the system fails, and it always does, the fine print kicks in. You must be doing it wrong. The failure is you. That shame is the strategy for a product that could never work. It's a scam!

Focus isn't a feature you unlock, it's a delicate and very fragile relationship with your own attention, discomfort, environment, and especially with your own forgiveness. Tools can help, sure. I love tools and I'm as tech optimistic as I could be, I build my life around tools! But tools are there to support the productive process, never to be the source itself. The moment your system becomes the center of gravity, you've stopped doing the work annd all you're doing is maintaining the very system that drags you down.

I believe it's also important to understand the question, because when someone asks "how do you focus?" what they really mean is "how do I begin when I'm not ready?". Beginning feels terrible because it means admitting you don't know what you're doing yet, you're sitting in ambiguity and letting it be uncomfortable, and confronting the very real possibility that what you make will be mediocre or wrong or just unfinished is hard to do.

Productivity tools are incredible at helping you avoid this feeling while still feeling like you did something. They'll give you the dopamine hit of motion, sans the substance of movement. Then the day ends, the work that mattered is still untouched, and you feel even worse. That's the trap!

What actually helps is the small and the boring, and doesn't screenshot well. People who ship real work make the start cheap. Instead of launching a new system, they open the document and type one sentence. Essentially, they shrink the distance between intention and contact with the work until it's almost nothing. It's something that people can train themselves to do, provided that they are willing to face the earlier mentioned mental discomforts.

Most build rituals around staying safe, the loop of planning, organizing, tool maintenance, they feel productive because they're tidy, and they're tidy because they avoid the messy part. The best rituals are the ones that get you into contact with the work within minutes. Why? Because clarity shows up after contact, not before! You don't think your way to a solution, you'll fail miserably instead. You make something terrible, then react to it. That's when the abstract ideas in your head becomes concrete improvement plans, and the motivation to keep going stops being a debate and more like an impulse you can't stop.

Also equally important is reducing the number of fights, which is an issue I myself often battle. I notice this most with my phone. When it sits beside my keyboard, I find myself reaching for it constantly, dozens of times an hour, and often without any conscious reason behind it. And each reach creates a tiny signal that breaks my attention. Letting notifications pop up uncontrollably also multiply the problem, as it means letting any random app, or anyone with my contact details grab the steering wheel of my day. I spent years treating this as a discipline challenge, trying to build up the willpower to resist. The real change for me came when I simply stopped treating it as a test of character and just removed the fight entirely. Now my phone charges in another room while I work, and notifications stay off. And just to clarify, these are small edits to my environment, they are not heroic acts of self-control and should not be treated as such. The whole point isn't to beat your subconscious into submission, but rather make the unwanted behavior inconvenient before the fight even starts. Friction is your friend here!

Lastly, the scope is the enemy. Most to-do lists are fantasy documents describing a superhero version of you. That's a profoundly naive take on the matter, because when you sit down as your actual tired self, with your own mistakes, your own weaknesses, your own limitations, that list becomes a machine for feeling behind at best, and at worst it causes deep shame and discouragement. Lists should contain one finish line per session and one visible artifact. That's it.

And focus will slip, that's inevitable and natural. When it does, practice actual self-kindness. Not the fake kindness of letting yourself off the hook (that's just giving up), but real kindness looks like curiosity without cruelty. "What happened there?" is good. "What's wrong with me?" is not.

So keep using whatever tools help, but keep them in their place. An app should be a list you occasionally consult, not a second job, and time tracking should be feedback, not a fanatical obsession. Why? Because if your system requires constant pruning just to stay functional, you lost! The system has become your job. In the same manner, if you need a new app to feel ready, you've outsourced permission to a corporation that profits from your waiting. You bought into the snake oil!

So ultimately, when people ask "how do you focus?" they're really asking "how do you keep showing up?", and of course the answer is never glamorous, otherwise Notion's team would be unemployed, and the productivity gurus would be working real jobs instead of living off everyone else's anxiety. And the simplest answer is making the start so small you can't talk yourself out of it. Beyond this, there's also the matter of making distractions inconvenient enough that negotiating with them feels difficult, choosing one finish line you can actually reach, and treating failure as information rather than the ultimate evidence that you're broken.

So go and put something real into the world, something you can point at and say "this exists because I made it". Even if it stays private. Then do it again tomorrow, don't turn your worth into productivity metrics. You're not a malfunctioning machine that needs better firmware. You're a human being doing hard things, and that's messy as hell. The industry wants you to forget that. Don't give them the satisfaction.