In this digital era, one of our most valuable resources is our attention. Every single moment of every day, we are inundated with new information and stimuli that may or may not add to our lives. We are more connected than ever for better or for worse. Our family can reach us all the way across the world, but so can our boss. We can hear about a deadly attack on another country, but we can also be subject to memes at 3 in the morning. This bombardment on our dwindling attention span is being too easily traded, like a commodity instead of the luxury that it is.
Our focus and attention is what allows us to be present and achieve depth, but if we are being pinged slack messages at every waking minute of the day, how are we supposed to work on the presentation that we are simultaneously being pinged about. Our attention is powerful and valuable and we need to begin to treat it as such. The minute that we allow others to steal our attention without ample gain we put ourselves at a deficit. Not everything we focus on needs to be life or death, but we need to be intentional about what we focus on. If we are sitting down to watch a movie let’s put everything else away and watch the movie. If we need to get some work done let’s sit at our desk and disable notifications.
This is easier said than done. We are being inundated with more and more media than ever before and thus our attention span is being stretched more than ever before. That being said, we have to become more diligent and aware of where our time is being spent. Silo your information and stimuli in order to optimize for depth. The more we can focus our attention on the task at hand the better off that we will be.