Attention is all my need

Aug 23, 2026 - Last updated: Sep 2, 2026

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Watching Videos, Using Social Media…
A Little Retrospective?
So, Who Stole My Time?

It has been a long time since I last wrote a blog post. The last one was back in early May. During that time, I had ideas for new articles many times, but every one of them ended up half-written and was deleted once I ran completely out of inspiration… Sometimes it really feels as though my time has been stolen. There are still so many things I want and need to do, yet I have made no progress at all. First, let’s look at what I do every day:

So this is roughly what I have been doing2 images

These fragmented distractions filled my entire vacation. Perhaps they really are time machines: they skipped over three months with ease. Now the vacation is over, and I can no longer use “it’s vacation” as an excuse. I have to get to work. I have to find every possible way to break free from the things that feed me dopamine—but how? Try giving up every electronic device? Maybe quit SNS?

I have a lot to do. As a student repeating my final year of high school, preparing for the Gaokao comes first, yet I have barely made any progress in my studies. The only thing I have kept up for a long time is memorizing vocabulary… With my group chat friends keeping an eye on me, I use an app to study some words every day, and I have now kept it going for over 300 days… But memorizing vocabulary alone is obviously not enough. I have hardly kept up with reading, writing, listening, or speaking; at most, I get some passive input while browsing technical communities.

I think keeping up vocabulary study for this long is pretty impressive, actually.

I Have So Many Books I Want to Read…

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Flowers for Algernon… I have only dipped into the beginnings of many books before setting them aside to gather dust on my reading list. Fragmented social and video platforms have sucked away most of my attention. Even when I turn my attention to text, web novels are still the first things to pull me in—though I like to think my taste in web novels is not too bad…

I Have So Many Games I Want to Play…

After I buy them, they sit quietly in my library, waiting for a day that never comes… Why do I procrastinate even when it comes to entertainment? I once recorded many gameplay sessions of Outer Wilds. Despite suffering from fairly severe 3D motion sickness, I still played it for a long time. It is an excellent game, and I really like it… So why did I stop playing? I also hid all the gameplay videos I recorded… Maybe the ending was already decided the moment I chose to open a video platform instead of the game one day? Let me make a bold promise here: when I have time, I will definitely finish recording it!

So, Do I Really Have No Time?

The answer is clearly no. I do have time—an enormous amount of it, even. After all, I openly wasted three whole months! I often get excited and want to do something… But before I begin, should I watch a beginner tutorial? So I open Bilibili and see that a creator I like has uploaded a new video, and my attention shifts to “finishing their video.” By the time it ends, I may have completely forgotten my original goal.

A Little Retrospective?

I have been disgusted many times by my chaotic time management and allocation of attention. Maybe I have a condition like ADHD; otherwise, I would not fit seemingly every stereotype, constantly losing and forgetting things… Yet the files on my computer are organized very neatly. Does my obsession with tidiness only exist in the digital realm?

What Is ADHD?

Since I mentioned ADHD stereotypes, let me search Google for the symptoms: switching to something else halfway through homework, forgetting to bring things, losing things, dropping many exam points for reasons unrelated to ability, frequently zoning out in class, being unable to start even as a deadline approaches, struggling for long periods to organize one’s room and materials, often forgetting what someone just asked you to do, a terrifyingly long Watch Later list, difficulty making choices, yet being able to focus intensely on things that are interesting and provide immediate feedback (tinkering with computers?)… These problems have followed me from primary school until now. Perhaps the only thing standing between me and a diagnosis is a trip to the hospital…

At the same time, my sleep schedule is extremely chaotic (I go to bed at 3–4 a.m.), my eating habits are highly irregular (mealtimes are all over the place), and my phone use is completely uncontrolled. I think all of these make my attention even more scattered. Besides that, I probably have quite a few physical health issues as well.

Does that mean the problem is solved? Is everything simply because I have ADHD? I do not think I can look at it that way, or I will start procrastinating again. This article does not require me to prove that. Since I have not been diagnosed, let me think about other things first!

Counting Up My Sins!

I often feel a mysterious surge of motivation, but it still fails to get many things started. In the end, it merely becomes something I say when encouraging other people. I often think about going to bed and getting up early or exercising, but I do neither, even though I know exactly how poor my health is now and how much a regular schedule and moderate exercise would help. I want to make videos, and I have even bought a lot of equipment for them, but some kind of perfectionism keeps me from starting. There is too much I want and need to do. Am I not ready to face it all? I keep wondering that.

I am always waiting for the perfect time to do something. When I lie in bed reading novels, I keep wanting to stop at a nice round chapter number or a neat point on the clock before going to sleep. Then I read until late at night—or morning—realize I might drop dead if I do not sleep, hurriedly turn off my phone, and close my eyes. My mind wanders through all kinds of things, so it may still take dozens of minutes before I fall asleep. This also means I frequently cannot get to sleep.

On a whim, I often start a drawing or an article, then give up halfway through. That birthday illustration I mentioned before still has nothing but a gray background. These unfinished tasks keep haunting and troubling me, making me think about them over and over… so I cannot sleep again. Vicious cycle: begin. At this very moment I have stopped focusing on this article again, opened ChatGPT, and asked it to search. It found an article, “Diagnosed with ADHD at 35”. It feels a little like AI slop (maybe), but it seems quite useful as a reference. ~~Isn’t this literally me (~~

I Procrastinate All the Time…

date: 2026-08-23
lastUpdated: 2026-09-02

Just like this article: I had already written part of it over a week ago, but only today did I find the motivation to bring it this far. And it is not only serious work that I put off—I even procrastinate on meaningful entertainment! If I had skipped revision in order to have fun, I would at least have had a fulfilling vacation. In reality, this vacation was only a little more eventful than usual (because I went out to meet some group chat friends, attended two in-person events, and traveled; beyond that, it was not much more meaningful). I made little progress on all those books and movies I wanted to see and games I wanted to play.

Of all that procrastination, SNS stole at least 90% of my time. The rest was probably spent sleeping in. Scrolling through QQ and videos requires no thought. I do not need to decide what to browse today, nor remember what I browsed yesterday; I can do it without using my brain at all. Or perhaps that is simply what these platforms are like—one has to admit it… I think I have become trapped by entertainment that starts instantly.

I can still build some habits. I have kept up vocabulary study for a very long time, but memorizing words also happens to be something that requires almost no startup effort.

So, Who Stole My Time?

Remember what I wrote at the beginning? As a student repeating my final year of high school, preparing for the Gaokao comes first… There are now 278 days until China’s 2027 National College Entrance Examination. This is bad. I do not have much time—or perhaps I still have plenty, but if I continue like this, something will inevitably go wrong. What if I score even lower than I did this time? Damn, I have stressed myself out again.

Obviously, I cannot expect to wake up tomorrow (actually today) and instantly become someone who studies intensively for more than ten hours a day. But I often have fantasies like that, and then those fantasies waste a few more minutes… That is probably another form of procrastination. How should I change my plan? That would just be another kind of procrastination. Is it fundamentally any different from buying a pile of equipment that gathers dust or waiting for the clock to hit an exact time?

So, who stole my time? Nothing suddenly carried away my entire summer. It disappeared after I opened SNS again and again in search of dopamine that started instantly and responded quickly… How should I use my time? How can I break my SNS addiction? This article will answer none of those questions. I am going to procrastinate now! It is already 01:20, and I should go to sleep… zZ