Mastering Attention
Just having a handle on your attention is huge. Many do not. Maybe a lot of life’s challenges are just areas where it’s difficult to maintain attention on something. You might be able to help yourself a lot just by better managing your attention.
I saw this with myself recently with my off-and-on efforts to sleep better. For the first two weeks of December, I was in a groove with sleep. I got into that groove by joining monthly sleep challenges on an app called Vital. Each month, the challenge is to get at least 7 hours of sleep every night, which is harder than it sounds. Participating in the sleep challenge sets up an engaging kind of game where you check your sleep statistics every day and share with others, trading tips and competing.
Having a time-limited challenge where your performance is clear and you have accountability to others is an excellent way to channel attention into improving in an area. It quickly becomes part of your day. It becomes an ongoing project that you experiment with day to day. When I do these challenges, I spend maybe 5 minutes a day thinking about my sleep and how to sleep better, which is actually significant. It’s a constructive, striving kind of attention instead of the feeling of learned helplessness I would often have before.
Simply looking at what you’re paying attention to by measuring where you spend your time can be a valuable way to measure where your energy is going and optimize your efforts. This is getting easier to do over time with calendar software and time-tracking tools like Screen Time on iPhones. AI assistance with tracking, analyzing, and optimizing time use could make it easier still, and mainstream. The average person might be able to have a much more purposeful and rewarding life just by mastering their time.