AttentionOS Basics: Manage Attention, Not Time

Hosted by Alex Migutsky

Sat, Apr 25, 2026

5:00 PM UTC (1 hour)

Virtual (Zoom)

Free to join

159 students

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Build Your AttentionOS: Stop Managing Time, Start Shipping What Matters
Alex Migutsky
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What you'll learn

Why time management keeps failing you

Discover the planning fallacy and energy cycles that make rigid schedules collapse - and what to do instead.

Build your complete starter system with real content

Populate Inbox, Next Steps, and People with your own work - ideas, tasks, and pending conversations, all captured.

Install the daily top-to-bottom scan habit

Learn the 5-minute morning routine that replaces deciding what to work on - scan from top, start on the first item.

Separate capture, planning, and execution modes

Stop the context switch tax by keeping modes distinct -  so you never lose a 90-minute focus block to reorganizing.

Survive abandoning the system for months

Learn the 15-minute restart protocol that lets you walk away for months and come back without starting over.

Why this topic matters

Look at your last week. You planned. You reorganized. You moved things between apps. You "got ready" to do the real work. You didn't do the real work. That's theater of productivity, and you've been trapped in it for years. The discipline isn't missing. The systems you've tried were built for a perfectly organized day that never happens. This session sets up the one that's built for your real life

You'll learn from

Alex Migutsky

Career Strategist for ambitious engineers at high-stakes decision points

I've used AttentionOS every day for 9 years.

34,000 items tracked across 3 companies, 2 layoffs, and several months of abandoning the system entirely. It survived all of it.


I built it while shipping Microsoft To Do from zero to 30 million users, then refined it at GitHub, and now teach it to engineers who are tired of productivity advice that doesn't stick.


Background:

  • Built Microsoft To Do (Outlook Tasks) web app from 0 to 30M monthly users.
  • Worked on availability and performance across the stack at GitHub.
  • Was an official Career Advisor at both Microsoft and GitHub.
  • Coached 400+ software engineers on execution, career strategy, and performance.
  • Author of "Every Programmer Should Know" (98k+ GitHub stars).
  • Co-founded 4 startups


Teaches two evidence-based cohort courses here on Maven.

Previously at

Microsoft
GitHub
Brainly
See all products from Alex

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