For decades we’ve been told that time management is the secret of effective leaders and professionals. It appears we were all wrong. After all, time is something beyond our control, so how can we manage it? What you should strive to achieve instead is attention management.
What Is Attention Management?
Let us imagine this scenario. You are working on a business proposal on your computer. Suddenly, your email notification pings. It could be something important. But it could also be something trivial. Do you continue working on your proposal, or check your email? If you keep your mind focused on the proposal, you have already achieved attention management.
To give a definition of this concept, it means developing and maintaining control over your attention. This ability to consciously focus your attention at all times helps you become a proactive leader rather than a reactive one.
What Is the Role of Attention Management?
According to productivity expert Maura Thomas, the human mind is working in one of the following four states:
- Reactive and distracted — the most common state for professionals and employees who are trying to multitask.
- Focused and mindful — when you make an effort to eliminate all distractions and focus on the task at hand.
- Daydreaming — when you take a break from work and relax your mind.
- Flow — this is the state when you are truly “in the zone” and fully focused on a task, oblivious to anything else.
Unfortunately, although flow is the perfect state for dealing with complex tasks, you cannot command it to happen. However, if you spend sufficient time in the focused and mindful state, flow is more likely to occur. And this is why attention management is important.
What Does Attaining Attention Management Involve?
So, how do you train yourself for attention management? What do you have to do to achieve it? First of all, you must learn to be aware of your mental state at all times. What is your mind really focused on? The task at hand now or the meeting you will have in one hour with a potential investor?
And once you have managed this awareness, how do you prevent others from interrupting it? Let’s face it: you will always have to deal with interruptions. Phone call, someone knocking on your office door, an email asking for your feedback… What you must do is recognize the need of telling people that you are not to be disturbed for a period of time. This is a form of saying “No”, but it is critical for achieving attention management.
Steps Towards Attention Management
Attention management requires control, both over things outside you and inside you. Here are the three forms of control you should achieve:
1. Control Your Environment
First of all, you must create a work environment conducive to focus and attention. This means that your office must be:
- Comfortable
- Neat
- Clutter-free.
As neuroscientists from Princeton University demonstrated, clutter can negatively impact the ability to focus and process information.
2. Control Technology
Smart devices exist to make your life and work simpler. In reality, they have become our masters in many aspects. How many times have you stopped whatever you were doing to check a notification on your mobile phone? How often do you worry whether you have enough battery available?
These are ways in which technology actually controls us. To achieve attention management, you have to turn things to their natural order. You control technology. You decide when you focus your attention on mobile notifications. Using features such as Do Not Disturb mode or the clutter-free workspace mode on the computer, you decide what your mind focuses on.
3. Control Your Behavior
This is probably the most difficult aspect of attention management. You must make a conscious effort to direct your mind power into a specific direction. It is hard at the beginning, but in time you will find it increasingly easier. It is just like going to the gym: you increase your capacity for sustaining effort without losing your breath.
However, each period of effort must be followed by a break. So make sure that after intense work on difficult projects you take a break and disconnect your mind from everything, allowing it to wander and daydream.
This article was originally published on pldx.org.
