My Thirty Day Challenge Notes

I just finished reading Rich Schefren’s Attention Age Doctrine 2 free report. You can download it by clicking that link.

I believe Rich is right. The most valuable thing we have to spend today is our time. Time is now worth more than money. Getting our time in the form of our full, undivided attention is what is extremely valuable today. His thesis is we are all suffering from attention deficit, but it’s not a disorder. It is a lack of time to give our full attention to just about everyone and everything we do during our waking hours. We even sleep less so we have more of these partial attention hours.

The euphemism for it is multi-tasking, but in reality, it is not paying full attention to the multiple things we’re trying to get done at the same time. We need to stop buying the myth that we can multi-task successfully. Humans cannot multi-task in most areas of our lives successfully. We can invent machines that do things for us so we are free to perform another task, but we can’t actually write an article and talk on the phone at the same time without both the writing and conversation being negatively affected. We can’t cut the grass and play with the children at the same time. We can’t drive and read or watch TV at the same time, unless we’d like to cause an accident. We can’t perform experiments in the lab while attending meetings. We can usually walk and have a conversation at the same time, but we don’t walk much because it’s faster to drive. We can drive and have a conversation as long as that conversion isn’t a distracting or important one. Why? Because driving safely requires our full attention, and important conversations require our full attention.

Marketers of any kind who don’t realize this and change with this fact of modern life are going to find themselves shut out of peoples lives completely because we simply don’t have time for them anymore and we won’t tolerate their interruptions.

We all spend a great deal of effort guarding our precious time. We spend a lot of effort to limit the information overload we constantly experience. There is always too much to read, hear and see every day. We don’t want to spend a single second more than we have to on listening to, reading or watching advertising.

We have caller ID so we can block or ignore anyone we don’t want to spend the time to speak with (mostly telemarketers).

We have TiVO or DVR to save the TV shows we want to watch commercial-free, and we download subscription podcasts of our favorite radio shows to listen to them commercial-free because we don’t want to spend any of our time watching or listening to commercials. Commercials take up about 21 minutes of a 1-hour radio show. I have better things to do with that 21 minutes.

We have spam filters on our email accounts and pop-up blockers on our internet browsers. We have RSS feed readers so we can eliminate everything we don’t want to read accept that to which we subscribe. And if someone bores us or wastes our time, we may press the button to cancel that subscription in a heart-beat.

We drive through at fast food restaurants and eat while we’re driving. Some men shave while they drive. Some women apply make-up while they drive. Many of us talk on the phone while we drive. Being a distracted driver is dangerous no matter what the distraction, but we drive distracted anyway, and we add to the traffic problems in our cities with an increased number of accidents.

We cook meals while helping the children with homework. We have a conversation with our spouse while we empty the dishwasher just after we put a load of laundry into the washing machine. We read while we eat or while watching the news, or we ignore the TV news and read it online when we have a moment. We no longer watch much TV because it takes too much time. The shows we do watch are on our schedule or on our digital recording service.

Sitting down together as a family at the table for dinner is rare. It was the norm when I grew up.

It’s very hard for us to turn everything off, sit down together and talk to each other without an interruption. I don’t wonder why people have family problems or why friendships fall apart. Without attention to each other and effective communication, relationships fail.

Our work is less than our best if we don’t devote our full attention to each important work task. Sure, there are work tasks that don’t require our full attention, but the ones that do must receive it or suffer in quality. If that happens enough, we may lose our jobs to someone who can better manage to give his or her full attention to the tasks that require it.

I believe therapists make so much money because they provide the one thing we can’t seem to provide for ourselves, undivided attention for 50 minutes in a row.

Tutors make money because they provide uninterrupted attention for 55 - 60 minutes in a row on the subject in which the student is being tutored. Adults aren’t the only ones who are over-scheduled and stressed out. Our teens especially are negatively affected by an over-scheduled life. They enter adulthood already burned out.

Our attention is the most valuable thing we can give and get. So when someone takes the time to make you a gift or write you a letter (especially by hand) or send you a card in the mail or spends time talking with you one-on-one, think about how much attention that person was giving you. The item or act itself may not seem like much, but the attention they gave you is the greatest gift you can receive. Thus, we show someone how much we care about them by how much of our undivided attention we give to them.

When someone or something is really important to us, the most valuable thing we can give is our full, undivided attention to that person or thing.

Let’s filter out the distractions with all our tools and spend the time we do have fully engaged in whoever we’re with or whatever we’re doing that’s important to us. In simpler terms, we need to find the things in life that we say yes to, and eliminate everything that we say no to. And we need to stop feeling guilty about saying no. We need to turn down the rheostat on our lives. It will make everything in our lives better.

How does this tie in with my blogging efforts? I need to give my full, undivided attention for at least an hour or two each day to producing great content and marketing my blogs. If I don’t do that I won’t accomplish anything on creating an asset over time. By focusing for a relatively short period each day on two tasks, writing content and marketing it, it will pay off in a big way later. In 6 months I’ll have a significant amount of content and it will be consistently marketed. But if I remain unfocused and only write a little here and market a little there in a haphazard fashion, 6 months could go by without significant progress. I don’t want that to happen.

Does anyone or anything get our undivided attention? Yes, if we choose to give it.

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written by joubess