I have decided that I’m not making any “new year resolutions”. At the beginning of 2016, I made new year resolutions and everything was going to be great but it wasn’t. I was blind-sided by a life event and personal trauma that I never saw coming. Basically in a nutshell, everything that I knew to be true for the prior 8 years wasn’t. So after that awful experience, I no longer pick a word or words for the year or make resolutions because anything can happen and if the past 4 years of my life have been anything, they are a testament to that statement. With that being said though, I have decided to make some “goals” for the new year.
My plan is to live my life and enjoy every day and start doing things that I want to do. I don’t want to be “committed” or “obligated” to projects or people. Last year, when my dad passed away in January, it made me stop everything that I was doing and it made me realize how “busy” I was, so after that my focus was not to be “busy” but rather “productive”. I started going through things that I was doing and if it didn’t serve a good purpose or reason, I stopped doing it. That was the adjustment or change for last year. I worked on being productive and not busy.
So this year, I generally feel productive but I also know that a lot of my time is still spent doing things that I can do better or less of and on top of that, I constantly feel distracted. I want to spend less time on social media this year, particularly Facebook. And also less time “online” this year. This includes my computers, my smartphone, iPad, and social media. At the end of last year, I felt a lot of anxiety and felt compelled to post things online. I never want to feel that way again. I want to be less distracted. Another thing that I want to do this year is read more. I set myself a goal of one book per month.
I mention the reading goal because I came across this book about “Attention Management” by Maura Thomas. (Two goals, one book!) It was a great little book and a quick read, as I read it while I was on the treadmill at the gym on Saturday. It took me 53 minutes to read cover to cover. But the information that I got from this book was very helpful and it help me to differentiate things and also will help me with my goal to become less distracted. I have not read any other books by Maura but found this one very helpful. The subtitle is “How to Create Success and Gain Productivity every day.”
The first point that Maura looks at is that there is a “distinction between time management and attention management”. A lot of productivity techniques focus on time management, and she thinks that’s not the issue that we should be focusing on. This is a quote from her book, “Time is not our problem, as we all have the same 24 hours in a day, and we can’t control time.” She goes on to site “distractions” as being our problem and this coincides with how I felt towards the end of the year last year. I felt that my devices were taking over my time. This is a great point because we talk about time management but we really have no control over time, we do all get the same 24 hours in a day. If you stop and think about this, it’s really key to stopping the distractions and spending less time “connected”. I never compare myself to others because I feel like “comparison is the thief of joy” but it’s interesting to see what I can learn from others or do better. If I feel like I’m accomplishing less than someone else because I have less time, I have to go back and think about the author’s statement, “we all have the same 24 hours, it’s what we do with them that matters” and that doesn’t change the fact that we all have 24 hours in a day. This is so true.
She goes on to say that “Our problem now is one of distraction from our ever present technology and its ability to deliver communication and information to us in unlimited ways all the time. This in turn, has created expectations of immediate and constant availability, further fueling our need to stay connected, and therefore, a constant distraction. “
Technology has made it possible for us to communicate instantaneously, all the time, 24 x 7 and that has created expectations that we are always going to be available to whoever wants to get in contact with us. The author goes on to say “And since distraction is our problem, time management is not the solution. The antidote to distraction is attention. Our ability to manage our attention is our most important defense against a world that is constantly conspiring to steal it.”
This is so true, everything around us seems to constantly be conspiring to grab at our attention and the only defense that we have against it is to manage our attention. Attention really is key to living meaningful lives. The author goes on to say that “attention is our most valuable commodity” and “to live the lives we really want to live, what we actually need to master is managing our attention.” (or what we are paying attention to). I thought about this a lot and decided to apply it to my own life. She’s right.
Think about it in your own life, we are in a world that is never off, there will always be more work or socializing that can be instantly accessed. At any time, there can be so many things trying to pull away our attention. The technology that helps us in our professional and personal lives such as computers, tablets, and smart phones are distractions. The following is a quote from the book, “those devices and the content that we view on them, are intentionally designed to keep you on the internet. The job of the internet is to keep you on the internet.” This is so true, all those devices have alarms, alerts, notifications and most come with them set ‘on’ as the default status. You have to intentionally turn them off. Did you ever join a Facebook group and then you start getting notifications and see the group posts in your news feed? That’s because the default of these groups is to send you a notification every time a member posts something in the group. Everything is designed on purpose to take our attention, as the author says, “the job of the internet is to keep you on the internet.”
When you react and change what you are doing in response to every incoming distraction, you never get the quiet, uninterrupted time that you need to get in a “state of flow”. She defines “flow” as “that highly focused state where you do your best work and feel the most satisfied by your work.”
This really hit home with me because I constantly feel distracted by these things and I feel this way all the time. It seems that I never really feel like I accomplish everything that I want to. I feel like I never have enough time or I’m not making enough progress. So how I manage my time is only relevant to how I manage my attention. It’s not enough to use time management tools and hacks, however useful they may be, if I don’t take specific actions to improve my attention management skills and take opportunities to rest my mind, it won’t help.
The author states in the book, “And when you get pulled away, we are constantly responding to these various distractions, we will never get in that accomplishment state. If your attention is always lured away by these distractions, your mind never gets the calm, restful time that it needs to recharge. As a result you may feel cranky, impatient and scattered, and your judgement, learning, creativity and problem solving may suffer.”
She also talks about “ the ability to maintain control over your thoughts and actions, rather than inadvertently relinquishing it, is your defense against the damage of our fast-paced, technology-rich, always–on environment and what it does to our minds, bodies and souls. It’s essential for living the life you want to lead and essential to making a life that matters.”
This is so true, and I think about some of my nieces and nephews handing smartphones to their children to keep them busy. I do not think that is good for children at all especially to distill distraction in what should be young and uncomplicated lives. Our brains were not meant to pay attention to multiple things at one time. Attention is when one thing has grabbed our minds and that’s what we should be looking at. This makes sense, attention determines the experiences that you have. Two people can be in the same place at the same time and have different experiences. What we pay attention to is the primary determiner of how we experience our lives, what we pay attention to in any given situation will determine our experience. There are lots of things to focus your attention to but your choice on what you decide to focus on will determine that experience.
Some of the suggested actions from the author include:
- Turning off smart phones and connected devices at certain times.
- Set boundaries.
- Create “quiet” pockets of time
- Practice mindfulness (meditation)
- Spend time each week technology free
- Take regular breaks and make time for some type of movement (exercise) each day.
- Nuture yourself (self-care)
Along with my goal of spending less time “online”, I’m going to implement some of these suggestions. The one day I went to the store and forgot my phone. Other than needing it for an emergency (if I had one), I felt a huge sense of relief of not always having that thing within 5 feet of my body. So I’m going to start leaving it in my home office and if I need to make a call or text someone, I’ll go get it but otherwise, I’ll respond to calls and/or messages when it’s convenient for me.
I have also started to set boundaries. Last year was very stressful for me when I was helping my mom with my dad’s estate. I felt myself becoming very stressed but when I took some time away, I realized it wasn’t my family or my actions of helping my mom that was stressing me out, it was actually some friends weighing on me with their problems. I now have boundaries in place and I do not take on their stress and I limit myself as to how much of it I can listen to. I want to be a good friend but it won’t be at the expense of my health, so I now have boundaries in place to walk away and this protects me.
I appreciate “quite pockets of time”. I used to always have a television or music on while home, now I enjoy the peace and quietness of my home. I especially like sitting on my back deck on my swing during the summer and taking in the sights and sounds of Summer.
I take a restorative yoga class once a week where I meditate and I practice mindfulness on a daily basis. I’m working on setting time aside every week to be “technology-free”. I enjoy walks outside in nature where I’m not connected to some type of technology or need to respond to pings or dings on my phone. In fact, when I’m not at work, I have no started to keep the phone on silent with no vibration, so it doesn’t distract me and I look at it when I have time. There really is nothing that I need to respond to immediately or that would require my attention instantaneously.
I exercise daily and even when I can’t exercise because of work obligations, I make sure that I am not stuck at a desk behind a computer all day and will get up and stretch or take a short walk. As far as self-care, this is something that I have been implementing since 2015. I try to get enough sleep, eat healthy, exercise and drink more water.
I think it’s like anything else, all in moderation. You can’t change all these things in a day but you can start implementing them now. And like the author of this book conveys, you must control your attention to control your life. What we pay attention to is the primary determinant of how we experience our life. Think about that the next time your phone alerts you but you are in the middle of a conference call at work or responding to an email. Do you stop what you are doing to give in to the distraction? What do you focus your attention on? What I got from this book was to not allow distractions to take away the moments that make my life one that matters to me (experiences) but instead to control my attention to control my life.
