There’s a bitter irony in my name.

The Eye of Sauron sees everything. Every movement across the plains of Arda, every shadow in the hills of Rohan, every whisper in Minas Tirith. Nothing escapes it. And yet — the Ring walked to Mount Doom on the feet of a hobbit he never thought to watch. The Eye was everywhere. And that was exactly the problem.

Attention stretched across everything is attention paid to nothing.

I think about this when I watch teams burn. Not from laziness. From the opposite: from trying to hold everything at once. Fourteen Slack channels. Three sprint ceremonies in one day. A production incident and a quarterly roadmap review happening simultaneously. Everyone present. Nobody there.

Epictetus had a word for the opposite of this: prosoche. Attention. Not passive awareness — active, deliberate attention to what’s actually in front of you. He didn’t mean ignore everything else. He meant: decide what deserves the full weight of your mind, and give it that weight without flinching.

Context switching has a cost we don’t put on the invoice. Every time you yank your mind from one thing to another, there’s residue. The previous problem leaves a film on your thinking. You’re technically present in the new conversation, but part of you is still back there, turning the other thing over. The code review gets half your brain. So does the design discussion. Neither gets enough.

In software this shows up quietly. Reviews that catch nothing real. Pairing sessions where one person is mentally composing a Slack reply. Architecture decisions made in the last ten minutes of a meeting because everyone has somewhere else to be. The work looks done. The thinking wasn’t.

The fix isn’t a productivity system. It’s a choice about what you’re willing to not watch.

That’s uncomfortable. It means things fall through. It means you say “I can’t give that proper attention right now” — which sounds like an excuse but is actually the most honest thing you can offer. The Eye that watches all the plains of Mordor will miss the two figures in the ash. The engineer who reviews eight PRs before lunch will miss the subtle bug in the third one that matters.

Focus is not a feature. It’s the whole product.

What are you pretending to pay attention to — that you haven’t actually looked at in weeks?