Quit Managing Your Time… Manage Your Attention

“Only one thing has to change for us to know happiness in our lives: where we focus our attention.” – Greg Anderson

This chapter is a perfect opportunity to point out that I did not talk about it yesterday when I was meaning to. Funny how that works. Following that train of thought, I have been known to notoriously mismanage my time, or so my mother has said. I might also add that I am a procrastinawesomator because I am just that awesome at putting things off until the last minute. (I tell myself I work better under pressure.) One last thing, I am easily distracted and have switched between windows and such for the last twenty minutes. I think I have plenty of material and experience to talk about what happens next…

You have been told, perhaps after turning in that term paper three days late, that you had to learn to manage your time. But how do you manage time? Your parents and teachers never explained that, and for a good reason: time is not manageable…

What you can manage, however, is your attention…

Most jobs today have multiple responsibilities that are constantly pulling our attention in many directions. If it’s true that we can recognize when things need to be done and direct our attention to doing them, then why do we so often run out of time before getting the important things done? It’s because we let our attention get diverted.

Before you go all, “Oooh, shiny” on me and click on some other link or diverting your attention to Facebook, I want you to think about how often you get distracted during the day. I’m one of those “Oooh, shiny” types, so it happens to me more often than I can count. I’m the one letting my attention go elsewhere. “Let’s just check and see what’s new on Tumblr. Has anyone commented on my latest journal entry? What’s the latest news on Facebook? That puppy pestering that baby is adorable.” (Google it, you know you want to.) Say what? Oh, you had important things to be doing, right. Let me get back to whatever it was we were discussing.

The first step in managing your attention is to precisely understand your priorities. There’s a big difference between managing your attention to accomplish priorities and checking off items on your to-do list. Our natural tendency is to do what is fun, convenient, or absolutely necessary at any given time – but your true priorities may not fit into any of those categories. In the absence of clearly defined priorities, you’ll find yourself involved in trivial pursuits. These will keep you from doing what needs to be done, but you’ll convince yourself that you’re accomplishing something.

It’s a bad idea to lie to yourself about how productively you’re managing your attention. here’s as question to ask yourself that will help you stay on track: If I could accomplish only one thing right now, what would that one thing be?

Personally, I LOVE to-do lists. Actually, I just like making lists because then it makes me feel moderately productive. I’m not in it for the high of crossing of things, but rather the feeling that I have brought some form of order to the chaos of work that needs to be done. I can’t say it actually works in boosting my productivity, it just looks pretty.

I’ve been trying to bring my focus together as a writer, which is taking a lot of work, more because I find blogging is still “writing” and can let myself get away with that as progress rather than work on my own stories. See? I’m an expert at letting my attention go every which way but where it needs to go.

For teachers, what about our students? Yes, we need to stop telling them to manage their time, but how do we try to get a child with ADHD to understand they need to just focus and pay attention? Increments? Let them stand? Let them walk around? How do they focus? Do they even like to?

The Eisenhower Method

This is a somewhat modified version of “The Eisenhower Method”, this one you should Google. This is all about identifying your priorities and getting to work on accomplishing them. The key is to distinguish the difference between important and urgent. Not everything that is urgent is important and vice versa. If a task is both important and urgent, then you need to DO IT. If a task is unimportant, but urgent, DELEGATE IT. If you have a task that is important, but not urgent, DEFER IT. Finally, if a task is both unimportant and not urgent, DUMP IT.

Genius is nothing but continued attention. – Claude-Adrien Helvetius

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