I am a skeptic.
I am a skeptic in the fact that I don’t believe what a lot of people say until I have tested it out for myself. It’s not their fault, it’s just how I am.
And so far, this has done wonders for me. I’ve been able to do things like sleep two hours per day; live an ubervegan lifestyle and not consume white potatoes, white rice, and sugar for example; go on for two years without watching television (still going), and recently I’ve turned my attention on the issue of being extremely productive.
If you go out looking for ways to be productive you’ll generally find the same information repeated everywhere:
1- Never check email in the morning.
2- Batch similar tasks together.
3- Stop checking Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn every five minutes.
4- Set a specific end period for a task.
5- Etc., etc., etc..
Now I don’t have an issue with the general message that people are conveying; the message of self improvement and general productivity. However, I don’t (and never will) think that anything worth doing, like self improvement, is easily accomplished by following a few ‘simple’ steps.
Simplicity is one of the most complicated things you’ll ever pursue in life.
But through ‘self-experimentation’ I’ve found a thought provoking idea that’s worth thinking about.
Saving Attention, Not Time
Calmness and productivity are not achieved by how much “time-saving” techniques you apply; they’re better achieved through how many “attention-saving” techniques you practice.
See, I tried the whole not checking your email in the morning, batching similar tasks, and not checking social sites thing and I found one similar problem that all these processes shared. They leave you constantly worrying about everything. And I mean everything.
People just can’t leave thing alone. In fact, most people that end up extremely productive always say something along the lines of “I never realized just how in control I needed to be”. They realize that their main issue of using time productively wasn’t that they were wasting it unnecessarily on unproductive things, but wasting it on worrying about not wasting it. Ladies and gentlemen we got us a catch-22.
So how do we solve this then? A catch-22 is generally a lose-lose situation right? Yes, but like we all learned from the ever popular hacker movie WarGames, the best way to win a game is to not play the game.
Why do you think minimalists have it so well? They’ve decided that they don’t want to play this game of who can own more stuff and who can do more things that they rest of society plays. They’ve decided to save their attention for only a certain amount of things. And for that the end up in a better situation.
Someone who’s learned how to use dozens of applications to streamline everything they do efficiently, and who has set up an overly-complicated system to handle a task like checking email will never be able to compete with the minimalist. They, unlike the minimalist, have decided that saving their time, not their attention, was the main goal. But, what do you think will happen if the tiniest obstacle gets in the way of their system? Their time flies out the window; they now have to devote all of their attention to every single application in their “system”, causing their time-saver to become a time-consumer.
If you still want to relatively “stay in the game”, then I hope you do one thing. Let someone else play the game for you; someone more skilled at it perhaps. Build a system where your emails are responded to automatically by an auto-responder. Build a system where other people (such as virtual assistants) are performing your attention consuming items for you. And then (most important step of all) don’t pay attention.
This will be the hardest step of all, to leave things alone and let others do them for you. You’ll constantly worry about what others are doing with your precious ‘things’.
This is where the whole let someone better than you handle it aspect comes in. If you’re not an accountant and you let an accountant handle your balance sheet and income reports would you really have a lot to worry about? If your not a social media expert, and you let one handle your online customer questions that arise from Twitter and/or Facebook would you have a lot to worry about? If you’ve never set up an event before and now have to, would you feel like it would be the end of the world if you let an event coordinator coordinate it for you. No you wouldn’t, you’d probably be in a better situation than you would be if you handled it yourself, because you know that you left it to more capable beings.
By allowing others (who are more capable) to handle all these issues, you’re not only saving time, you’re saving your attention.
Your attention will most likely still be “un-saved” for the first couple of weeks that you apply this method. But, stick with it! Remember, nothing worth doing is easy. And, if you continue to to stick with it you’ll find that you gradually (nothing is instant) reach that point where you’re not wasting your newly found time worrying about everything. I say “newly found time” because by decreasing the amount of things that take up your attention, you’ll naturally decrease the things that take up your time.
So, if you want to gain more time, and better yet more attention, then stop chasing the “time-saving” devices. Stop buying all the things around you that promise to save you time. If you don’t use these applications, or products, or whatever without thinking about how much attention you have to give to it then you’ll find that they’ll just become other products that consumes your precious time.
Time without attention is worth shit. Like time, your attention is precious, you’ll never get it back. So instead of spending it on things that save you time like an idiot, save it for the things that actually matter in your life. Like say, enjoying it maybe.
photo credit: samantha celera