I’d blogged last month about Attention and a resolve to start giving 100% attention to everything I do.
I tend to think most things as muscles these days – intelligence, ability, habit and the only way to build them, as a result, as deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is a term used a lot in a great book I’m reading called ‘Talent is Overrated’ by Geoff Colvin. More on this concept later.
If you’ve ever done any sort of muscle building in the gym, you know that it is a painful process especially in the initial stages. And I’m going through the same, rather difficult process. The end objective here would be to have it so ingrained in my head that if I get a phone call (for example), I am 100% on the call. Being present, and doing one thing at a time – that’s the aspiration.
I realize now that I wrote about attention exactly one month ago. I feel there’s been a fair bit of improvement on this front. I do my best to take any phone calls away from my computer so I’m not tempted to open the browser or my email. As for work, I use a cool piece of freeware called the Procrastination Killer. This is a piece of freeware I’d learnt about 4 years or so ago but never got around to using it for more than a week despite many attempts over the year. The big reason is that the philosophy built in is to spend 10 minutes working and then take a 2 minute break. This never works. My breaks spill. I ended up keeping the same ratio and lengthening the work and break time by doing 25 minutes with a 5 minute break.
And I realized a few days into this new system that I had accidentally stumbled into the Pomodoro technique. That’s been working pretty well.
I am convinced 100% Attention is where true productivity lies. For now, it’s still the hard work phase involved with building this muscle. But, like all muscle building, I’m hopeful this will become part of the flow soon.
A Learning a Day 