Your attention is your most precious resource: conserve it

Adam Tinworth
Adam Tinworth

This is a really good guide to retaking control of your attention:

The first step for successful self-defence is avoidance. Try to avoid as many dangerous situations as possible. In this context this would mean, stay away from every distraction, which doesn’t add a lot of value to your life. Does Reddit or Twitter improve your life? Does surfing hours on Instagram or Facebook help you with your life goals? If not, stay away as often as possible. This is a very personal decision, what might be a distraction to one person, might improve the life of another.

There’s a bunch of point by point steps to consider taking, too. Not all of them will apply to everyone, but some of them will apply to you.

Why does this matter?

The most precious thing you own is not money or time. It is attention. We all have (more or less) the same amount of hours on this planet. But what we do with it, what we achieve is up to us. We decide where we point our attention to. But do we really?

This ability to manage our own attention is becoming key skill of the 21st century – which is why we need to teach it to our children.

attentionattention economyattention wars

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Adam is a lecturer, trainer and writer. He's been a blogger for over 20 years, and a journalist for more than 30. He lectures on audience strategy and engagement at City, University of London.

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