I don't have any big goal in 2026. I just want my Attention back

January 1st, 2026

January 1st usually comes with the same ritual: setting goals for the year ahead. This time, I didn’t want to repeat the pattern. Ambitious resolutions written with good intentions, then quietly abandoned by mid-January.

Instead, I asked myself a simpler question: what is the one thing that could improve everything else?

The answer surprised me by how obvious it was.

I don’t need bigger goals in 2026. I need my attention back.

The problem

Most days start the same way.

Before I’m fully awake, my phone is already in my hand. I answer emails from bed. I catch up on AI tweets. If there’s a quiet moment, I open Instagram or YouTube, sometimes without even noticing the decision.

The phone becomes my command center. Work, news, entertainment, boredom, all compressed into the same small screen.

What looks like efficiency is actually constant switching. One minute I’m replying to an email, the next I’m reading about a new model release, then I’m watching a short video because my brain wants a break.

By the time the day really starts, my attention is already fragmented.

Why it got worse in 2025

In 2025, the issue wasn’t the number of projects. I can handle parallel work. I actually enjoy it.

What broke my focus was the constant inflow.

Messages, meetings, follow-ups, threads, pings. Rarely deep enough to require full attention, but frequent enough to interrupt it.

My responsibilities grew fast. I was helping build and lead an AI and Data team in the public sector, coordinating across multiple initiatives, and staying available to move things forward. I’m grateful for the trust that came with that.

But the day was no longer shaped by work blocks. It was shaped by interruptions.

A meeting here. A message there. A quick reply that turned into five. Contexts stacked on top of each other without time to settle.

At times, it felt like my brain had too many open tabs. Not because the work was too hard, but because nothing stayed open long enough to finish.

That’s when I noticed something worrying: I would occasionally forget what was said in a meeting just ten minutes earlier.

To compensate, I started using AI tools that listen to calls and generate summaries. The tools worked.

I didn’t.

The summaries piled up unread, because by the time they arrived, my attention had already moved somewhere else.

The AI FOMO loop

On top of everything else, there was AI.

In 2025, progress felt relentless. New models, new papers, new demos, week after week. I genuinely wanted to keep up. Not out of hype, but out of fear of missing where things were heading.

When I scrolled, I wasn’t looking for entertainment. I was looking for reassurance.

I didn’t want to miss the future.

So I tried to sample everything. I tested new tools once, just enough to get a feel. I followed accounts that tracked releases from Chinese labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and others.

Every interesting tweet became a bookmark. Something to return to later.

Later never came.

The bookmarks piled up. Instead of clarity, they created pressure. Evidence of how much I still hadn’t read, watched, or understood.

Scrolling turned into a loop. Each pass promised relief. Maybe this time I’ll catch the important thing. Instead, it delivered more inputs, more fragments, more unfinished thoughts.

At some point, my screen time on X alone crept past three hours a day. Add Instagram and everything else, and staying "up to date" started to cost more than it gave back.

The cost

The biggest cost wasn’t distraction. It was fatigue.

Not the kind you fix with sleep or a weekend off. A quieter, heavier tiredness that followed me through the day.

I would sit down to work already feeling spent. Not burned out, just drained. As if my mental energy had been leaking away in small amounts, all day, every day.

Nothing felt fully demanding, yet everything felt exhausting.

By the evening, my brain didn’t want depth. It wanted ease. More scrolling. More light input. The same habits that caused the fatigue started to feel like the only relief from it.

That’s when I realized something was off. I wasn’t tired because I worked too hard. I was tired because my attention never rested.

What I miss

What I miss most isn’t productivity.

It’s calm.

Back in high school and university, I could sit with a single thing for hours. A book. A problem. A blank page. There was no pressure to check anything else. No background noise pulling at my attention.

My mind felt quiet.

Deep work wasn’t something I had to force. It emerged naturally from that calm. Time would stretch. Thoughts had space to develop. Progress happened without friction.

Today, even when I have time, my mind often feels restless, like it’s waiting for the next interruption. Calm has become rare, and because of that, depth has become harder to reach.

In the age of AI, this kind of calm is more than nostalgia. It’s leverage. In a way, it’s the human equivalent of giving a model more tokens to reason. Less rushing, more room to think, better results. The ability to stay with one problem long enough to understand it deeply is what turns powerful tools into real outcomes.

The reset: running experiments, not a system

I don’t have a master plan to fix my attention. That’s intentional.

Instead of committing to a new productivity system or a strict set of rules, I’m treating 2026 as a series of small experiments.

I’m borrowing the tiny experiments mindset from Anne-Laure Le Cunff (Tiny Experiments). The idea is simple: make a small change, run it for a short period, observe what happens, take notes, then decide what to keep.

I’m not trying to be right. I’m trying to learn.

For now, I’m starting with two simple tests.

Experiment 1: Social media only on my laptop (2 weeks).

I deleted the apps from my phone. Almost immediately, the phone went quiet. Quiet enough that I can feel the urge to reinstall them. That discomfort is data. I’m writing it down.

Experiment 2: Walking without podcasts or music (2 weeks).

This one will be harder. I’m aiming for around 10,000 steps a day, and I’ve trained myself to fill every walk with input. Now I’m testing the opposite: letting my mind wander, get bored, and settle.

I don’t know what will work. Some of these experiments might fail, and that’s fine.

The goal isn’t discipline. It’s feedback.

I’ll keep notes, adjust, and share what I learn as I go. Not as advice, but as a record of what happens when you stop optimizing for more and start experimenting with less.