Whatever occupies your mind most becomes your god. This is the line that jumped out at me from todays passage. While think this is the loosest of definitions of god I have ever heard, there is some wisdom to the implied advice: that we pay attention to what is dominating our thoughts. If we can select what dominates our thoughts, rather than letting them be selected for us, we gain a degree of focus in our lives. Each day is so riddled with distractions. We live in a time and place where the myth of multitasking persists and the habit of zigzagging runs rampant. Putting out the biggest fire is one way I often hear it expressed (and have expressed it myself). And when you add the cacophony of a multitude of new electronic interfaces in our lives, there is often little sense of control over what dominates our attention. I once (quite a long time ago) did an exercise when I documented, for a full week, everything I spent my time on. At the end of the week, I gather the various activities and assessed how much time/attention was spent on each, and for how long. The results amazed me. Except for sleeping, my week was broken up into activities that averaged only a few minutes in length - a testimony to how much my life was driven by stimulus/response. I would zig-zag badly form one thing to another. Computer scientists have a name for this: they call it context switching. You computer is actually running dozens of programs simultaneously, rapidly switching form one to the other. But every switch requires computer resources to execute. A poorly functioning computer can spend so many resources switching from one program to another, it spend very little time actually doing anything. As a user, you would experience this as a very sluggish computer. Computer scientists call this thrashing. My analysis suggested I was thrashing badly - and my productivity showed this to be the case. The other amazing outcome of my experiment was to identify what I actually thought was important! Before I did the analysis, at the suggestion of a mentor, I made a list of what I found most important in life (both personally and professionally) and sequence it by order of importance. When I compared that list to the data, I found I spent an enormous amount of time on things I thought were unimportant, and very little time on the important stuff. I am still not great at it - but I am rapidly learning the lesson of the stones, which I heard from a speaker, somewhere. He had a pail in front of him and piles of stone of various size, all the way down to a bucket of sand. The size of the stones represented the importance of the thing. He began filling the bucket starting with the smallest stones (least important things). By the time he had filled the bucket, there was no room for the largest stones (important things). But when he started with the largest stones first, an amazing (but obvious) thing happened: as the stones got smaller, they would fall into the cracks between the large stones. The sand (least important) simply poured in and filled all the gaps. He was able to fit all of the rocks and sand into the bucket - simply by taking the bigger things first. It was an eye-opening demonstration.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 15:52:33 +0000
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