Focus is a Personal Commodity
I am not sure whether you noticed or not, but I have not posted a blog in the last two weeks. I did not post on my Instagram in the last week either.
This was intentional.
Two weeks ago I started a new job. At this new job, I have a lot to learn. It is a new industry of work for me, going from Higher Education to trucking. I have extensive experience working with people and learning new things, so I have been confident I could learn this new thing and work with new people. But it was a large task in front of me, to understand the operations and logistics that I need to have my hands in.
So I chose to put a pause on the content I have been sharing. I did have a financial coaching session, but otherwise I put my focus on this new thing.
Why? One of the perks of this new job is that it generally can be set down at the end of the day; it does not follow me home like my old job did. So why could I not still work on these other things that I am passionate about?
One thing I have learned over the past few years is this: focus and attention are personal commodities that have limits. It is my job to understand that idea and choose where I put those commodities.
A Distracted Society
Some animals have the ability to point their eyes in different directions. This is primarily a defense mechanism, serving to protect them from predators and threats. Humans for the most part do not fall into this category.
I think the fact that our eyes cannot focus in more than one direction is indicative to how our brain works: we cannot split our focus and be highly effective. We are not meant to focus ourselves in different directions.
Honestly, we live in a distracted society. You may have heard the statistic that the average attention span of the modern adult is between 8-9 seconds, published and popularized by TIME in 2015. And while the truth about your attention span is that it is probably more selective based on the task (I can focus a LONG time when studying up on fantasy football), I do observe some merit in this 8 second idea: we are more easily distracted today than we were 20 years ago.
A friend of mine shared an observation that he saw in the cinema: scenes seem to be shorter than they use to and they are using cuts to change scenes more than they use to, and he thinks this has to do with the attention span idea. But you can see it on social media: how many posts or videos do you scroll through before watching one all the way through? And maybe it is not that you can’t spend time on a video, but you are looking for something that you choose to spend time on. So you scroll through 7 videos before watching one all the way through.
We are distracted.
We get so caught up trying to do too much that we never do anything worthwhile. We get so caught up trying to see what everyone else is doing that we forget to be present. A divided focus will eventually be some degree of ineffective.
The Limitation
Living in a distracted society does not help our focus and attention. But even if we lived in a laser focused society like robots, we still would have limits on our focus and attention.
That limitation is time.
I have heard people say, and been guilty of saying, “if only I had a few more hours in the day”. What a copout.
You, me, your grandma, my neighbor, your cat, we all have the same number of hours in a day. That time in front of us is an opportunity. That time behind us is an expense. And as a snapshot, it is a limitation.
You cannot give more focus and attention than time allows.
Time is a natural limitation on life. We do not need more hours in the day; we need to utilize the hours that we have in a better way. Nature is what it is; we will not change time. In fact we need to embrace the laws of nature instead of using them as an excuse. The limitation of time applies to your focus and attention as well.
A Choice
So understanding that I am limited on time, and recognizing that I live in a distracted society, I made a conscious choice to put my focus and attention primarily towards learning this new thing. It is not that I never will chase my side hustles and passions, on the contrary. I want to do this job so well that it sets me up to chase A Life Worth Remark.
So I consciously choose to spend my focus and attention towards learning my new job. Because I know that trying to split my focus would not set me up for success in either realm.
And now, with a better understanding of my job and the expectations and the operations, I can put some of my mental energy, my focus, and my attention towards continuing to build A Life Worth Remark.
Here is my challenge for you: are you allowing yourself to split your focus? Even splitting your focus between good things can be a bad thing. Or maybe you are allowing yourself to be distracted by superfluous things?
Jason “Propaganda” Petty has a line in one of his songs that has stayed with me for over ten years now and it directly applies to your focus and attention. He said, “multitasking is a myth; you ain't doin' anything good; just everything awful”.
Consider this week where you are putting your focus and attention.