Stepping into Focus, page 11.
“What will your life have been, in the end, but the sum total of everything you spent it focusing on?” – Oliver Burkeman
Life in the Distracted Economy
- Focusing on everything means focusing on nothing.
- It’s almost impossible to accomplish anything significant when you’re racing through an endless litany of tasks and emergencies.
- Nobel Prize-winning Economist, Herbert Simon, warned that the growth of information could become a burden. Why is this?
- “Information consumes the attention of its recipients,” he explained, and “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
- Information is no longer scarce. But attention is.
- Collectively, we send over two hundred million emails every minute. Professionals start the day hundreds deep with hundreds more on the way. But don’t stop there. Toss in the data feeds, phone calls, texts, drop-in visits, instant messages, nonstop meetings, and surprise problems that flood our phones, computers, tablets, and workplaces.
- Research shows that we get interrupted or distracted every three minutes on average.
- Most of us just jam our day with the buss and grind of low-value activity. We don’t invest our time in big and important projects. Instead, we are tyrannized by tiny tasks.
- As a result, we are failing to advance our organizations.
