Hi Reader,

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It’s often said that time is our most precious resource. I don’t think that’s true. I think attention is our most precious resource. Attention is a more limited resource than your time. Your productivity and indeed your mental wellbeing depends heavily on how you choose to ‘spend’ your attention.

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In an average day, you will have 3 different levels of attention:

1. Proactive attention: This is where you are fully focused, alert, in the zone, and ready to make your most important decisions or tackle your most complex tasks.

2. Active attention: This is where you're plugged in, ticking along, but perhaps flagging slightly. You're easily distracted, occasionally brilliant, but often sloppy too.

3. Inactive attention: The lights are on but no one appears to be home. There's not too much brainpower left, and you're likely to really struggle with complex or difficult tasks. Your attention here isn't worthless, but its value is limited.

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Of course, these are crude and artificial demarcations, but useful ones to think about when trying to maximize your productivity through good attention management. I have spent the last two years watching my attention management trends and flows and talking to others about their own patterns, too. Here's a pattern I see regularly. It's the classic "morning person":

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8–9 a.m. Active Attention. Traveling and arriving at work. Coffee kicking in. Doing some reading, thinking, or email.

9–11 a.m. Proactive Attention. Either it gets spent smashing through the hardest thing on your list, or it's lost in someone else's boring meeting or emails.

11 a.m.–1 p.m. Active Attention. We're back in the middle, doing good work (but not great work).

1:30–3:30 p.m. Inactive attention. Post-lunch. The day is dragging. Had too many carbs for lunch. Struggling for concentration. The coffee is starting to taste a bit sickly, too.

3:30–4:30 p.m. Active attention. Second wind! Hooray! Getting some reasonable work done again.

4:30–5:30 p.m. Inactive attention. The official caffeine crash. Shuffle some papers or work furiously to get that email sent out before you go home.

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How much proactive attention time do we have here? Less than you think. Two to three hours a day, Monday to Thursday, and a couple of hours on a Friday, probably.

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Every job will have within it a range of tasks. These will often range from making huge decisions about what to do and when to do it, through to updating contact information, filing things away, or changing the printer cartridge. Once you start to focus on your attention levels, you'll start to realize that it's a criminal waste to be changing the printer cartridge during a period of proactive attention. It's like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, although in that moment it probably feels no different to when you change the printer cartridge at any other time - attention management is a subtle game.

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It's worth thinking about your natural strengths and weaknesses here. Save tasks that you find particularly difficult for when your attention level is proactive, leave the intense but easier stuff for those active attention times, and try to save up the easy or dull stuff for when you're capable of little else.

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So, five things you can do to help you manage your attention wisely:

• Use a label or category on your to-do list app (or a star symbol or similar if you’re pen and paper based), so that you group all of your hardest tasks together. When your attention is good, choose only from this list.
• Keep a separate to-do list category for the inactive attention tasks (I call this “the mindless list” – it’s all the stuff I can do when I’m half asleep)
• Check in with yourself at the start of the day, with a focus on how you’ll manage your attention (“how’s my energy today?”, “when am I likely to be at my best?”, “how can I protect my proactive attention times so that I put that attention to the best possible use?”)
• Once a week, devote some of your best attention to a ‘Weekly Review’ (more on this in How to be a Productivity Ninja). Thinking and planning - if you’re doing it well - is amongst the hardest work you’ll do this week, so schedule it wisely for the best results.
• Talk to your team about what you each need to manage your attention well - think about ideas like a no-meeting day, or periods of being ‘offline’ or in ‘deep work’ mode. Team cultures that operate with an awareness of these differing levels of attention tend to be higher performing teams.

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So this week I invite you to expeiment with your attention levels - how can you utilise them to get great work done, but also to reduce your stress levels, and feel great about the choices you're making. Let me know how you get on.

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Have a great week,

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Graham

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