If You Don't Protect Your Attention, Someone Else Will Use It

(Transcript edited for clarity.)

Hi, I'm Wes. Welcome to If You Don't Protect Your Attention, Someone Else Will Use It.

I like my working title even better: Protect Your Attention Like Your Future Depends on It, because it does.

If you're not protecting your attention and focus, something or someone else will demand it.

Your future depends on you protecting what you focus on and where your attention goes.

I'm going to give you some ideas on how you can do that in today's episode, but you really need to protect your focus.

The first step is figuring out that you need to protect it and that your future really does depend on it.

Then you can intentionally start doing things to protect your attention and focus.

The truth is, my life took a tremendous jump forward when I started intentionally taking control of my time, attention, and focus.

I'm going to tell you how I did that.

It was fairly simple, but it was not something I thought would be that powerful before I did it.

So here's your question to think about and hopefully make this stick with you throughout the episode:

Who or what is deciding where your attention goes every day?

Who or what decides where your attention goes?

It's easy to say, "Well, I control it."

But do you really?

Have you intentionally created a system or framework in your life where you get to choose where your attention and focus go?

Or have you created a system or framework where you let your attention be pulled wherever?

Do you let other things control your attention?

Before we go too deep into this, there are certain things that happen in your life or business that are going to require your attention.

There's no doubt about that.

But you need to make sure you control the other times when you're not dealing with a fire you've got to put out.

So who or what is deciding where your attention goes every day?

How can you do this intentionally instead of letting your attention be pulled wherever?

Here's what I did.

Again, this sounds simple.

But if you don't do this, try it, because it worked a hundred times better than I ever dreamed.

I simply started using a different management system for my time.

I started focusing on listing my top priorities every day.

I started farther out with priorities for the year, the month, and the week.

But each day I would look at my top priorities and rank them.

The number one priority of the day is what I worked on first.

I would time block that first.

Then I would time block the second priority.

I was intentionally working on the things I assigned as the highest priorities for the day.

That way, I could make sure every day I was stacking a win on the most important things to me.

You keep stacking them.

If you continuously work on your highest priority before or around life, business, and everything else getting in the way, that's how you make progress toward what you decide is important.

Again, I decide what I want to work on.

I decide the order of my priorities.

Then I decide where to put them into my time blocks.

Then I decide to make them a priority.

This is all something you can do.

That is how I took control over where my focus and attention go.

It made a huge change in my life, and it can make a change in yours too.

Remember why: you've got to protect your attention and focus like your future depends on it.

Because it does.

Attention and focus are limited.

We only have so much attention or focus that we can use.

Every distraction spends part of our attention or focus.

If the day goes completely off the rails and everything seems to be pulling at your attention and focus, it's going to wear you down.

You've only got so much.

Let's say you have 10 units of focus and attention for the day.

You probably can't plan all 10 of those units every day because there are going to be things that come into your life or business that you've got to deal with.

That's going to use some of those units of attention or focus.

But here's what happens if you don't intentionally schedule as much of your important focus and attention as possible.

At the end of the day, you may have spent all 10 attention-and-focus units dealing with other stuff and gotten nothing done on your priorities.

Maybe you don't even have your priorities.

Maybe you need to start there.

Start by identifying your top priorities so you know what's most important to work on.

Here's the opposite of that.

Make sure you work on your number one priority first.

The first available time you have in the day, start work on your number one priority.

Then life, business, and everything else can come crashing down and start stealing your attention-and-focus units away.

That way, even if your day goes completely wrong, at least you've done something on your number one priority because you started with it before everything else took over.

Here's another trick I use.

I commit to working on my number one priority before I go to bed, no matter what.

No matter what happens that day, I'm going to work on it.

Even if my day starts with some sort of fire I've got to put out or a problem I've got to solve, I'm not going to bed that night until I get some work done on my number one priority.

That requires two things.

One, you know what your number one priority is.

Two, you have the intentional dedication that you're going to work on it every single day.

That's what you've got to decide.

You've got to become the person who's so dedicated to whatever your number one priority is that you won't sleep before doing something toward it every day.

What gets your attention repeatedly tends to shape your decisions and behavior.

You can let the world shape your decisions and behavior, or you can take control and intentionally shape them.

That's what I'm talking about here.

I keep saying intentionally, but it's important that you intentionally design your day, time, and life so you choose where your attention and focus go.

Because if you don't control it, something or someone else will.

Phones, notifications, media, people, and environments all compete for your attention.

They all do this by design.

If you're on social media and scrolling, it's designed to keep showing you things it learns that you like so you spend more time on it.

It's a design.

Phones are designed to get your attention.

If the ringer is on, we've all been trained growing up that if the phone rings, you need to answer it.

So what's the answer for that?

Turn off the ringer on the phone.

Stop going to social media to start scrolling.

Those things are designed to pull your attention and focus away.

Instead, intentionally design your life to pull your focus and attention toward the things you decide are most important or are priorities.

Decide what deserves your best attention before your day starts.

That's what I'm talking about.

Again, it seems simple, but once I started identifying my number one priority, number two priority, and so on for the day, and intentionally creating time for my number one priority every day, it changed my life.

It was as simple as that.

I did have to work on the mental part of it.

I had to become the person who wouldn't go to bed without working on my number one priority.

It's easy, especially when you first get started, to think, "I've had a rough day. I deserve the day off. I don't have to work on this this evening. I'm tired. I can't help it that my day went haywire."

That's fine.

That's your choice.

But that is not how you reach your big goals.

You reach them by becoming the person who says, "No, I know I'm tired, but I'm going to take 15 minutes right now and do something on that before I go to sleep."

You might need to build that over time.

I had to work on it over time, but the more you do it, the more that's the person you intentionally become.

Create boundaries and friction around distractions instead of relying on willpower.

If the phone ringer is on and the phone rings, that pulls your attention and focus away.

That's friction, but not in a good way.

If you turn the ringer off, set the phone down, and don't look at it, then you've created the opposite kind of friction - the good kind.

In order for that phone to distract you now, you've got to actually go to where the phone is and look at it.

That's friction.

You might still do that occasionally, but you get to choose when you do it instead of it squawking at you all the time.

That's a simple example, but it's a real example.

Intentionally decide, "I don't want to be distracted by the phone for the next hour," so you turn off the ringer and put it somewhere else.

Then in an hour you can look at it.

That's fine.

You've intentionally decided that.

Protecting attention is not about avoiding the world.

It's about choosing what gets access to your mind and when it gets access to your mind.

This is all about intentionally creating your life so you can maximize your attention and focus and not let things steal them when you need or want to work on something different.

I hope this helps.

This is Wes with Your Life Systems.

Thanks for being with me.

Please like and subscribe, and I'll see you soon.

What's Next?

·        Identify your number one priority before the day starts.

·        Protect the first available block of focused time for that priority.

·        Decide which distractions do not get immediate access to your attention.

·        Turn off or move one device that regularly interrupts important work.

·        Commit to touching the number one priority before bed, even if the day goes sideways.

·        Review where your attention actually went and adjust the system for tomorrow.

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