Attention!
The one thing you can do to reduce your stress, improve your relationships and productivity… Pay full attention to who or what is in front of you right now.
That’s it.
Simple.
But easier said than done.
Our schedules are bursting at the seams with back-to-back meetings, we’re constantly interrupted with ‘just a quick question’, or another message or news story pops up on our phone and grabs our attention.
We may think we’ll cope by multitasking, but research shows we don’t. And we can’t. As the author of ‘the Myth of Multitasking’, Dave Crenshaw, points out instead of multitasking ‘we’re simply switching between tasks at speed’. And, with every switch there’s friction, resulting in increased stress, reduced productivity, and sometimes even weakening of relationships.
Remember the last time you spoke to someone who was distracted by something seemingly more important and how deflated, angry or anxious it made you feel? Yet how often do we ourselves get distracted from genuinely focusing our full attention on the person in front of us?
There are multiple benefits of paying full attention to what we are doing right here and right now. Here are three of the most compelling ones:
We transform our relationships by showing decency and respect for those we are with.
The most trusted and charismatic leaders master one thing particularly well: Their focus is solely on the person in front of them to make that person feel like they are the only one who matters.
As senior McKinsey & company executive, Dominic Barton, shares when talking to Rasmus Hougaard for the brilliant book ‘The Mind of the Leader’:
“If you’re not focused, if you’re not present, it’s discouraging to the other people. They lose motivation. If you’re not present, I think you may as well not have the meeting.” - Dominic Barton
We reduce our stress levels. Ever noticed how irritated you feel when you are concentrating on something and get interrupted? That’s because our brains aren’t designed to do several things at once. Doing one thing at a time reduces our feelings of overwhelm and the resulting stress responses. We ultimately feel happier.
We become more productive. To be at our most productive, we require clarity of mind. That means reaching what the late psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, called 'flow'.
Research suggests it usually takes around 25 minutes to find our flow. The moment we break it, the clock resets. We then need another 25 minutes to regain that same level of focus and productivity.
Yet, a 2019 study by RescueTime found that 40% of knowledge workers never get more than 30 minutes of uninterrupted time to do focused work.
It seems Ronald Heifetz was spot on when he said: “Attention is the currency of leadership”.
So, given our attention is so critical to our professional success, yet it’s also so easily broken, what can we do to better protect it?
First, start wtih the easy stuff and minimise distractions and interruptions:
Put your phone away when you are talking to someone.
Choose the seat least likely to distract your focus in a meeting.
Better bundle your diary time for focused and non-focused work, and
Harness what author Dave Crenshaw describes as the power of ‘when’. That’s all about agreeing which communication channels are for what purpose and when someone can expect a response.
Then maximise your mindfulness.
To begin, that can be as simple as scheduling mini pauses during your day, moments to stop, breathe, and collect your presence.
But the best way to train your brain is through regular mindfulness practice. Here neuroscientist, Amishi Jha, is well worth checking out as she’s dedicated herself to understanding the science of attention.
What’s particularly endearing about Jha, is that she started from a place of scepticism and doubt around the value of mindfulness for those, like her, in a professional setting. But, following years of research, she changed her mind. Her book ‘Peak Mind’ offers practical exercises that can sharpen attention with 12 minutes practice a day.
May 2022
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