Everything is competing for your attention: social media, news, video… you name it, chances are it wants your attention.
The reason for that is simple: your attention is valuable. It’s particularly valuable because it’s finite. There are only so many things you can attend to in the course of your waking hours.
And when it comes do doing your best work, attention is arguably your most important resource.
Because there are virtually an unlimited amount of things we could do and attention helps us distinguish between what’s important to us and what we can ignore. In short: attention helps us to focus.
The Attention Bank
Imagine your attention as a bank account. Let’s say you have a finite amount of 100 units available.
How would you spend this limited amount?
From this point of view, two types spending emerge:
Type 1: Investments
An investment is the attention put to attaining the goals you want to achieve. By investing, you end up increasing the available units at your disposal.
Type 2: Costs
Anything that doesn’t pay into goal attainment becomes an expenditure. You spend the units, have less units available to invest and when the units are used, they are gone without growing in size.
A Quick Reframe
It’s natural to view attention as either being positive or negative.
You can think of your attention as neither good nor bad, but either supporting you in reaching your goals or not. Either your attention moves in the direction of your goals (investment) or it does not (cost).
Also, there’s nothing inherently wrong with expenditures either. It’s the dosage that makes all the difference.
The Solution
There are three easy steps that you can do right now to help you shift from a cost-heavy attention bank to an investment-focused one.
Step 1: Observe
That’s a pretty cool feature humans have: we can observe ourselves. If I asked you to stop and watch your thoughts. You could do that.
If I asked you to direct your attention to your right hand, you’d be able to do that too.
Something that inevitably happens is that your mind wanders (it likes doing that) and that’s ok.
So step 1 is to simply observe yourself in your day to day.
Step 2: Ask
When you are in observation-mode, ask yourself this question:
“Does what I’m currently putting my attention to get me closer to my goal?”
You’ll sharpen your attention by observing and questioning your go-to way of operating.
Step 3 (optional): Adapt
If you find yourself answering no, you can follow up with this question:
What do I want to put my attention to now that pays into my goals?