Hello and welcome.

How have you been?

Before jumping in, if you just thought, “I have no idea why I’m getting this newsletter,” you can fix that quickly and easily. Just hit the button below. No hard feelings.

Here’s what I have for you today:

• One big thing. What you give your attention to, moment by moment, quietly adds up to the story of your life. Digital distractions are not the main problem.

• You have to check this out. Managers versus makers and the power of one thing. 1️⃣

• Tools and tech. A quarterly planner to focus your attention. 📆

Let’s jump in. 🦘

1️⃣ ONE BIG THING

The sum of your attention.

Imagine you’re at a cocktail party.

The party is in a bar adjacent to a hotel lobby. There are 30-40 people you know in some capacity from work. With 15 or more conversations happening simultaneously, it is getting noisy. But you're able to tune out irrelevant sounds and listen to your colleague’s Italian vacation story.

Psychologists call this skill selective attention. If you’re like me, picking out voices in a noisy room is getting harder by the year, but the fact you can do this at all is neurologically remarkable.

According to Professor Timothy Wilson, your five senses take in about 11 million bits of information per second. However, you can only consciously process about 40 of those bits per second (0.0004 percent), with the rest being filtered out of conscious perception.

As your colleague continues telling everyone how great Italy is, you suddenly hear someone say your name from across the room. How did this happen? Have you been listening to every conversation in the bar the whole time?

This impressive feat is referred to as the Cocktail Party Effect. Your brain is indeed absorbing far more than the 40 bits of information per second you can consciously process, but the superfluous inputs are suppressed so that you can focus your attention.

It’s like your brain is a radio tuned to a single station but still covertly receiving signals from all of the other stations.

Neuroscientists talk about two kinds of attention:

1. Executive or top-down attention is the product of conscious decisions about where to focus. This is within your conscious control, managed by the prefrontal cortex.

2. Stimulus-driven or bottom-up attention is the involuntary capture of attention by salient or novel stimuli. This is managed by what Wilson calls the adaptive unconscious (adaptive because it plays a large role in our survival).  

Here is where things get even more interesting.

The adaptive unconscious isn’t concerned with the past. It can’t make plans for the future. It lives in the here and now, filtering both internal and external stimuli and waving a big red flag to redirect your conscious attention when it decides something is important—such as hearing your name across a noisy room or seeing a snake in the grass as you walk.

Remember the dog named Doug in the movie Up saying, “Squirrel!” That’s stimulus-driven attention.

The prefrontal cortex, which is the nexus for considering past experiences and potential future outcomes, manages executive attention in the conscious mind.

So, when you decide where to focus your attention, you can factor in lessons learned and desired future outcomes. Of course, this doesn’t mean you always will.

Let me explain.

A single-beam flashlight.

In last week’s newsletter, I discussed time, saying you can’t actually spend, waste, or save it. Time is not like money sitting in an external account you can manipulate.

Instead, as Martin Heidegger argued in Being and Time, life and time cannot be separated. Life happens inside of time, and you move forward together with time.

And you cannot control time, despite the seductive promises of so many time management systems.

What you can control is your attention. Your uniquely human brain gives you the ability to consciously direct your attention.

This power comes with one catch: you can only focus your attention on one thing at any given time. Like a beam of light from a flashlight, you can illuminate one thing, leaving everything else in a darkened periphery.

You can only tune a radio to one station at a time. Noise is to the left and right of the station.

You can drive while talking to someone. Your mind can wander while you are reading. You can pretend you are multitasking. But your top-down, conscious attention is only ever focused on one thing at a time.

Driving happens automatically in the background. Reading by scanning words in order may continue, but you are no longer processing those words. Multitasking is just sequentially focused attention (diminishing productivity by 40%).

Attention is life.

Because you can indeed control your attention, it is tempting to think of it as a resource, like a stock of food in the fridge. This line of thinking suggests that attention is a fuel that powers your life.

But this dangerously minimizes the real role of attention in your life.

Attention is life.

“Your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been,” explains Oliver Burkeman.

“So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say you are paying with your life.”

This powerful idea allows you to think about attention and time together. It offers something of a formula: Your collective memory of your life equals where you directed your attention sequentially over time.

Spotlights and disco balls.

The attention over time equation forces us to consider units of time. If it would be impossible to direct your attention to one thing for your entire life (duh), then how finely can you and should you break up units of time when it comes to focusing attention?

Research suggests you can focus on one thing for 30-90 minutes before directed attention fatigue sets in.

But I’d argue this type of thinking misses the forest for the trees. This gets you back into the world of productivity hacks and obsessive time management.

If attention is a flashlight focusing its beam on one thing at a time, most people’s lives look more like the wall of a dance club with ten disco balls—tiny fragments of light flashing on and off for seconds at a time.

Today’s lamentations on divided attention and scattered focus single out digital distractions. These are powerful. We are surrounded by the most powerful sources of distraction ever designed, with our largest industries commandeering and then selling our attention as their primary revenue source.

But this is not a uniquely modern problem.

Marcus Aurelius advised, "Concentrate every minute like a Roman— like a man— on doing what's in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions." (Presumably, the Roman women would be forever tethered to their distractions.)

A distracting text message at work.

If you think of distractions as primarily digital, you can minimize the power of direct attention. Remember, your life is the sum of all the things you pay attention to.

Imagine you’re at work, commendably focusing on one task with time blocking or some other productivity technique when a text message diverts your attention. Arg, I forgot to turn off notifications.

You’d be tempted to refine your approach to better ward off distractions.

But what if the job itself is the real distraction?

Your job is an investment of a big slice of your attention, and therefore your life, in something that may not be aligned with your overall life priorities.

In this way, your focus on trivial distractions may be the costliest distraction of all.

Not everything matters equally.

So what’s a modern soul to do? You have the most addictive slot machine ever created in your pocket. The demands for your attention are like a gaggle of baby geese in a very noisy nest.

I won't pretend to solve this problem in our limited time today.

But let’s get moving in the right direction. I’ll cover a few ways to approach this challenge below, and then I’ll return to some of the more nuanced aspects of this idea in future newsletters.

The first place to look for direction is the to-do list. If you’re like me, you have had to-do lists that reference other to-do lists.

The fundamental flaw of the to-do list is that all of the items appear to hold equal weight. They tyrannize you with the trivial.

Activity is unrelated to productivity, and productivity misdirected is the ultimate distraction.

“It's not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?" said Henry David Thoreau.

Here is a helpful approach often attributed to Warren Buffett. It’s time to zoom out. Make a list of the top 25 things you want out of life, then arrange them in order from the most important to the least. Buffett says the top five should be where you direct your attention.

The next step is where the value is. Rather than keeping the remaining 20 items around for when you have more capacity, Buffett advises you to avoid these at all costs. These are the very ambitions that are not top-tier important yet seductive enough to distract you from the five that matter the most.

It is easy to trim things you don't want to do from your life.

In order to direct the spotlight of your attention on things you value the most, you also need to say no to the fabulous, compelling, and once-in-a-lifetime opportunities you absolutely do want to do.

It seems foolish to doubt Buffett, but I’d argue that five priorities are too many.

“If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one,” according to a Russian proverb. 🐰🐰

To prioritize further, you can bring time back into the equation. Remember, attention occurs over time. You can only tune into one radio station at a time, but you can plan to listen to each station for a long period of time before turning the dial to progress to the next station.

The ultimate goal is to find your “one thing”. This is the central tenant of the book The One Thing, which I’ve recommended below. Clarity on your one thing is transformative and freeing.

It’s an idea I’ll return to in this newsletter soon. 

Thank you for reading this week. I’m glad you’re here.

See you next Sunday,

Kevin