Constancy

Key Claims

• Constancy concerns training your predictive attention to serve your task attention in continuing the engagement with the task.
• Constancy is how you shape your predictive attention to pull your task attention through the task (time).
• Constancy’s matter is the transition from step to step within a task.
• Deliberate effort by task attention to carry out strategy decreases as the strategy becomes habituated into the predictive attention.
• Constancy shapes strategies over time.
• Working well with a given strategy makes that strategy more salient, allowing predictive attention to pull you through it more easily.
• Mastery is when your predictive attention is fully trained to follow a strategy without the need for ongoing deliberation by task attention.
• Flow is the result of task attention being pulled according to strategy through the task by predictive attention.
• Flow is the most rewarding state, so it gives strategy the most salience.
• Flow leads to the fastest attainment of mastery.
• Constancy allows you to attain and maintain the state of flow.
• Habituation of distractors is the work of constancy. Happens in flow most easily.
• Hyperfocus is when task attention follows a strong (highly incentivized) pull from your predictive attention down a path that it did not deliberately set.
• Hyperfocus has high salience but without the guidance of deliberately crafted strategies.
• Automation is the opposite of constancy: a series of steps without deliberation.
• Automation happens when distractors have been sensitized.
• Automation sensitizes distractors.
• Automation is the same thing as tunnel vision caused by cravings.
• All growth attained in work is attributable to constancy.
• Perceived effort in the task is when your task attention faces uncertainty in how to order your predictive attention.
• Constancy reduces perceived effort to zero. (Aka, “effortless attention” or flow.) (As does hyperfocus.)