Jamie Flinchbaugh, the founder of JFlinch and author of People Solve Problems: The Power of Every Person, Every Day, Every Problem, shares his insights on the importance of attention management. In the world of sports, a baseball player can effortlessly score home runs during practice. However, the scenario changes when the player is in a packed stadium, with the game’s outcome hanging in the balance. The player’s success hinges on their ability to concentrate on what’s essential and disregard the rest. This same level of focus is crucial for leaders navigating the intricate landscape of today’s corporate world. Leaders often find themselves juggling numerous tasks, which can lead to feelings of being overwhelmed and ineffective.
The Misconception: Time Management
Leaders have been conditioned to believe that time management is one of their most vital skills. This belief often translates to trying to cram as much as possible into their schedule. However, despite their best efforts to extend their working hours, leaders often find it impossible to accommodate everything, leading to emotional stress and a decline in performance.
The Answer: Attention Management
While time management is crucial, attention management holds greater significance. A baseball player doesn’t distribute their attention equally among all the stimuli around them. Instead, they focus on what’s most important.
While time management is crucial, attention management holds greater significance.
Warren Buffett, a highly successful individual, is known for his quote, “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” This statement underscores the importance of concentrating on a few critical decisions rather than diluting our focus across numerous less important decisions.
Making Significant Decisions
Reflect on your past day, week, or even year. How many of your decisions and actions significantly influenced the outcome? And how much effort did you put into finding the perfect solution? Unfortunately, this effort can often be in vain, as there is rarely a single correct answer for most decisions and problems. Instead, there are several good answers, and we must avoid wasting effort in pursuit of an elusive perfection.
By attempting to focus our attention on too many things, we risk missing the crucial moment. When our attention is fully engaged, we can overlook important new information. This could be a shift in the competitive environment, the early signs of a team conflict, or a process failure. We need to allow our attention enough flexibility to notice and engage with new and important signals.
Delving Deeper
Another reason to manage your attention is to make space for creativity and problem-solving. True innovation comes from spending enough time with problems to unlock creativity. This requires creating space and time for these valuable opportunities.
True innovation comes from spending enough time with problems to unlock creativity.
Consider what occupies your mind during your drive home, a long walk or run, or while doing chores. Do you flit from one issue to another, feeling overwhelmed and ineffective? Or do you keep returning to the same challenging problem until you solve it, enabling you to make confident decisions? Focusing your attention involves eliminating the wrong things from your attention. The key takeaway is to do fewer things better. Dive deeper into fewer decisions and problems.
Identifying Attention Drains
Attention drains are anything that diverts our focus from what truly matters. They can be external, like constant electronic notifications, or internal, like negative self-talk. These drains act like gravity, continually pulling us away from what we should focus on. Attention drains need to be managed, eliminated, or reduced. Common culprits include multitasking, complexity, and negative self-talk.
A popular meme states, “My mind is like an internet browser. I have 17 tabs open, four of them are frozen, and I don’t know where the music is coming from.” If your topics are important, they deserve your full attention. If they’re not important, why are they occupying your attention at all? This might sound straightforward, but to some extent, effective performance is just that simple.
Complexity is another attention drain. We often surround a pending task, decision, or problem with unnecessary complexity, drawing us in far deeper than required. For instance, consider the infamous menu at the Cheesecake Factory, with over 250 items. Does anyone need 250 items to find a dish they’d like to eat? How much more energy does it take to make a decision with so many options?
While a restaurant menu might seem trivial, there are plenty of work “menus” with just as much complexity. Whether it’s our product portfolio, our pricing options, who to invite to a meeting, who needs to review the work before a decision, and so on. Reducing complexity makes engaging in important work less complex and also reduces cost and increases quality.
Another attention drain is negative self-talk and worrying. Phrases like “What if” and “That could have been better” can occupy your mind, diverting your attention from many other things. Avoiding these attention drains is a worthwhile endeavor, but simply processing them and discarding them quickly can be equally beneficial.
Strategies for managing and leveraging your valuable attention
- Prioritize and Plan
Start by getting clear on your most important goals and priorities. What truly matters most to you? Once you identify your highest priorities, plan your days/weeks around making progress on those things first before letting other distractions take over. Create a schedule and designate specific times to work on your top priorities without interruptions. - Eliminate Distractions
Our modern world is filled with endless distractions that can easily hijack our attention. Identify your biggest distractions and take steps to eliminate or minimize them. Disable notifications, log out of social media, use website blockers, put your phone on silent/grayscale, etc. Set strict boundaries around when and how you’ll engage with potential distractions. - Practice Single-Tasking
Multi-tasking is a myth that destroys focus and attention. Train yourself to single-task by focusing all your attention on one thing at a time. When working, remove all other distractions and potential novelties that could pull your mind away. - Take Breaks
While single-tasking is powerful, our brains have limits on how long we can sustain intense focus. Follow productive work periods with real breaks that allow you to recharge. Get up, go for a walk, do something non-work related to “reset” before your next focus session. - Rest and Recharge
Insufficient sleep, rest, nutrition, etc. all degrade our ability to focus and sustain attention. Prioritize adequate sleep, build rest into your routines, eat nutritious foods, exercise, and engage in restorative habits. - Meditation and Mindfulness
Regular meditation and mindfulness practices can significantly improve your ability to regulate your attention and maintain focused awareness for extended periods. Start small and build the habit. - Reduce Overwhelming Inputs
Our attention spans are limited. Be intentional about reducing overwhelming information inputs like emails, notifications, news consumption, etc. Use filters and curation to control the fire hose of data coming your way. - Protect Your Energy
Your energy levels greatly impact your focus and attention. Protect your energy by saying no to commitments that drain you, set boundaries around your availability, and reduce energy-taxing inputs/outputs. - Review and Optimize
Regularly review where you’re directing your attention and see if adjustments are needed. Iterate and optimize your attention management strategies based on what’s working or not working.
The key is being extremely intentional about how you allocate your attention, building habits and systems to support focused engagement, and fiercely guarding this incredibly valuable resource.
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