It is not how much you have, its how you use it.
This is true. Partially.
Because while it is important to use resources effectively, you have to have some resources to use to begin with. And, while it is possible to do a lot with a little in some circumstances, the amount is always going to broaden or narrow the opportunities available. And, this is why "how you use it" is so important.
A colleague and I were talking about this today in regard to the team I am in, where while we have a massive amount of things on our plate, I feel that we are too diluted and spread too thin. This means that we don't have as much impact as we could, but also, things are very hard to manage and connect activities up with each other to compound against one another. Things move forward across multiple fronts, but it is slow going and there is a lot of wastage.
While slow and steady might win the race, in businesses where conditions and needs are quite fluid, taking too long to get something accomplished will see its need wane, and the early work superseded. It is like half building a house, and then changing the design. Or, the analogy I gave to my colleague was starting five house projects, when there is only money to cover one of them. Getting five twenty percent done, doesn't add value at all.
Too many irons in the fire. Smothers the fire.
When it comes to investing, it is good to diversify. However, spreading a little here and there in unconnected vehicles is unlikely to yield much. Some might go up very high, but most will just go nowhere for a loss. An indexed fund however is spreading out across many, but keeping them connected. Again, it won't yield astronomical highs, but it is mitigates the risk of loss.
Resource allocation is vital across pretty much everything we find important to us, because everything we find important requires resources. Love might be free, but don't spend enough time with the ones we love and that love will fade, as people drift apart. Time is of course one of the most valuable resources.
Right?
I would posit that time isn't that valuable at all, because it doesn't actually do anything to have or not have it. An individual can have all the time in the world, but if they have nothing to do within that time, what is the point of having it?
What I consider the most valuable resource we have at our disposable, is our attention. Where we put our attention will heavily affect our experience at every level of our lives. And, because we live in an attention economy, all businesses and governments, are vying for our attention in order to meet their agenda of increasing their own wealth and control.
But, like all resources, our attention is limited, as even if we have the time on our hands, our brains just can't handle that much. The average adult can spend around 15-20 minutes on an activity before attention wavers. However, even that isn't the problem. Because when it comes to pure attention, we can only concentrate for about 8 seconds, before it wavers. Supposedly, less than a goldfish - though I am not sure how they tested the fish. This 8 seconds of pure attention used to be 12 seconds twenty years ago, which means that we are fifty percent worse than we were.
Going back to what we were talking about in regards to spreading resources to thin across too many areas and getting nothing of value accomplished - consider social media streams. Watch people scroll through at a rapid pace, from one topic to another, getting the feeling that they are getting value, but actually doing nothing at all. It isn't the time spent that is the biggest problem with the obsessive thumbing behavior, it is the loss of attention.
That attention could be spent on more valuable content, content that supports improvement, or hobbies, or actually applying methods to build skills and habits. But instead, it is being sucked away, into a void, for zero return.
I sound a lot like my grandad, a grumpy old man who would call the TV the "idiot box", but was he wrong? The TV didn't come with us in the past, we had to go outside without it, catch the bus without it, shop without it and go to school without it. Now though, the idiot box is always with us, always connected, and always showing exactly what we want to see, when we want to see it, wherever we happen to be.
And it is designed to capture our attention to the point we feel compelled to keep giving more of our opportunity to it. And the more we give, the less we have to spend on noticing what we are giving up in order to feed it. We get the sense of progression, yet move nowhere.
This article is about 1000 words and you might have read or skimmed through it, looking for something of interest or to comment upon. However, did you pay attention all the way through to the article, or did your thoughts wander, find other memories to feed upon, other threads in your mind to pull? Is there a difference in your thoughts when reading an article like this, or scrolling five minutes of Instagram?
We often talk about how valuable our time is;
Yet give our attention away for free.
If you comment here, you might get paid.
But who is paying attention?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
Wow what a crazy metric to be able to measure. I knew these dang Gen-Zers were distractable but by that much?! I wonder how much worse it is for the next generation that I am teaching now. This does not give me much hope.
Well funny you ask, because I typically copy and paste the quotes I respond to in the moment, before even finishing the article. So as I read through, if there is a quote or point that evokes a response from me, I pop it into the comments and write my reply immediately.
Sometimes this yields interesting results because I'll respond to a point you make before reading your conclusion where you may also address it. I also find that this allows me to better connect to my stream of thought in the moment, so I don't lose what I was thinking about as I progress through your writing.
I think it is going to get worse - because not only is the attention span going down, but it creates a learning gap to increase it again.
I thought I was the only sucker that did this! :D
I reckon there is value in it and doing so leads to more considered answers. Many just answer to one particular point that they remember at the end, losing what they had gathered along the way.
There's benefits to both approaches. When you comment to a point in the moment, you don't get to see the big picture until you're done with the comment. But you're right, I prefer to write what I feel when I feel it so it stays fresh.
Attention and focus can be easily trained using for example meditation with a subject, even paying attention to breathing is improving focus. And of course, the pinnacle of attention training, lucid dreaming. For world class level.
Yes I do breathwork in the morning when I wake up and it is something I very much want to incorporate into my classroom with my 11-13 year old students.
I relate to this a lot. Hence, I am looking for ways not to spread myself too thin all over the multitude of stuff I wish to be able to do and master. Picking and choosing, what I dedicate more of my time and accepting the fact that I will likely not have time to cover all of it in my lifetime.
Of course, there is a difference. But reading in general has not been the easiest for me my whole life. It takes a lot of intense focusing to read and grasp. Sure, I can skim through stuff while my mind is all over my thoughts that never stop, but then I do not grasp what I read. It takes some time to gain some fluidity where what I read takes over my thoughts and makes them stop or go away further in the background.
That said, I think that this struggling could be dealt with by just training my focus a little more.
Concentration on only a couple will likely lead to fast improvement and more motivation during that time, before moving on. They say "choose the ten things you want to learn, and then cut 7 of them."
Perhaps the cause for it is because you have avoided it in the past?
Umm. Yeah. I wish it was as simple. Maybe it is. Currently it is still more like I keep 7 and drop 3 xD. But at least, I am not trying to do all of them at once and failing to do anything at all in the end.
It is probably trauma. I think I basically was made to believe I suck at it. Something like that, and I never really pushed myself to improve in that area.
Right when you said "idiot box" was when I trailed off into my own idiot box. Because I could relate to that and it brought back memories. Totally beyond my control. Just happened.
The moment I lost focus was actually the moment I focused more, yet that was several prior moments processed in an instant. So, there's plenty of concentrated time to be found in those moments of losing concentration.
That's interesting.
Everything else was flow, where the mind is hopping word to word. While being fed the information, there's not much focus involved. Just following the rhythm, doing what we're trained to do, when we read. All we're doing is building a picture in our minds, one word at a time. If you lose your place, it's still there.
And I doubt this entire episode would stand out at some point in the future, when this all happens again. So was this truly worth my time?
I'll say yes.
Yes, this is interesting - because while the mind wanders just as often, it wanders on a kind of backbone of inspiration. Scrolling Instagram etc, it just wanders, aimlessly, generating little coherent, nor actionable. I think there is a reason that the commenting on social media is so lame, and it comes down to the content itself, and the way people consume the content.
Not much stands out at the time it was consumed, but I do think that reading an article has more chance of making an impact on the memory, or driving a thought that leads somewhere, because it gives the time to think a little. That constant scroll doesn't come with the same level of thought involved, if any at all. And, with such low investment to consume, why comment at all?
Like window shopping with empty pockets. Start talking to the products and people will think you're weird.
If something is eye-catching and one does leave a response, another comes along to ridicule how much time was spent writing a comment, or something along those lines. I can't point to any studies but I picked something up along the way about how often intelligent individuals become targets on social media, due to their natural behavior, and tend to shy away from participating.
The constant scroll you speak of doesn't build one picture. Barrage of stimuli.
The act of reading is a constant, mindless scroll, forming one picture, or several pictures that belong together. Collage of stimuli.
At the end of the day, those platforms make a lot of money, by design, off the minds of people in a trance. If they stop to think, they're not window shopping.
I think a lot of the topics you mentioned are subjective. Watching TV or going through social media can be pointless to some people, but if it is the one that brings joy to people after a long day's work, then it is beneficial for those who do it. One can even argue that it isn't that much different to reading from a fiction book. Diversifying portfolio can mitigate risk, but the attention is split, and the returns versus one that has been focused on will be less. I guess a good discussion is what determines the value of what someone is doing. Is it just monetary. Is it developing a skill that you won't use anywhere. Is it improving relationships with others. It all boils down to what is important to the person. What might be valuable to one, may be of little value to others.
Everything is subjective from a human experience :)
It is quite different from the creative aspect, as when reading, the brain generates the imagery itself, essentially creating a new world with an individual perspective. No two are ever the same. When feeding from images and video clips, the thought is far less rich, and everyone consuming sees the same.
Absolutely. Yet, I think we are becoming less able to do this for ourselves, because we have been conditioned to be consumers. So, we will value the entertainment more, because we have been taught to. Just like any religious indoctrination.
Heh, heh, heh, did you pay attention… Let's see how much I get paid for commenting....
You know, there's a saying that goes like this ‘what doesn't cost us, let's make it a party’, and remember that ‘time goes by, we get older’. Where I was born, they called the TV ‘Pandora's box’.
I particularly think that we only value time when we need the ‘25th hour’ to finish our obligations, that's when we dedicate all our effort and exhaust ourselves with its dose of stress. Otherwise, when we get old, and we see the photo album we get sad, because we lost the years of life that will never return.
Friend, live the now, take advantage of every moment to feel the sun, to see that the moon follows you, to count the stars, to enjoy the sea, to keep painting the stones no matter the design. Share that game that Smallsteps loves, and don't forget the chocolate and the bouquet of flowers for your wife.
Never heard this before.
At least Pandora's box made life interesting and more diverse. I think TV goes the other way, making us think and act more homogenously.
I'm going to be spending way too much time trying to figure out if I actually have an attention span of 8 seconds now, thanks for that lol
Let me know when you....
... what was I writing about?
I think that diminishing marginal utility in economy is also valid for our feelings :)
Diminished marginal utility of us as humans :)
This kind of trips me out given that I can concentrate pretty intensely for multiple hours on anything that has my interest and I'll be lucky if I can force my brain to focus on anything I don't want to do for longer than a second.
Probably the latter, my brain likes to think about everything everywhere at all levels of detail all at once, I however don't keep up x_x
ADHD or autism? ;D
I used to have the same problem at night, where I would just think so much. Once I really started writing decently, it all went away and I sleep like a drunken baby.
Probably both x_x
both too lazy and don't have time to get an official diagnosis, current job somewhat knows about it but it hasn't been a problem, they just let me do my haha quirky little hacks like keeping my watch on so I have a prayer of figuring out which way left and right is (hilarity is I have a tattoo on my left arm that I know is on my left arm but it still doesn't always grok) and giving the kids coloured toys because I can't wrap my head around American warmup but colour patterns are easy
LoL! As far as I can tell that's a common problem. During the day your average adult is usually incredibly busy working, doing chores, running errands, caring for family etc etc etc that you don't have time to process anything that you need to process until all you want to do is go to sleep at the end of a busy day but seeing as that's literally the only time you have, that's when the brain goes nope first we need to process absolutely everything XD
I occasionally wonder if that might also be part of the reason why a lot of people do the revenge bedtime procrastination thing as well, I know people who will be on their phones til they can't physically keep their eyes open anymore because they're actively refusing to process things
I think time is our main currency and many of us is just wasting it without really thinking. You equal time with money and you can realize how much television or other silly stuff is really costing us. TO give one example. But then, time wasted doing something you like is not really wasted. Or is it?
Time is just a tracker, attention is the active component. Time passes regardless of how it is spent, attention can be left unspent.
I see awareness as the active component, with focus and attention being just part of it. As in regard of time, being in the present moment is the real deal, as opposed to train of thought being in the past (regret) or in the future (worry). We can go into much more detail, but the main thing is, this young generation is lacking all of them metrics. All. Very rarely we can see exceptions.
If my attention is a resource, not only do I have very little of it, but it is spread all across the country too!
"smeared" across the country :D
What I find interesting is that while Witcher 3 is my favorite game of all time it seems that I have more to say about Dragon age 2( a game that is rather mediocre in comparison).
What makes the difference?
Witcher 3 for me is perfect in every way. Dragon age 2 has some serious flaws like reused maps and waves of enemies that often appear seemingly out of nowhere. But the last time I played dragon age 2 very long time ago. Also If I remember right I started playing dragon age games with DA2. So maybe I do have some nostalgia for it despite it's shortcomings.
Multiple investments is good but I will like to ask a clear question to understand what you’re saying
Does it mean that we should diversify our investments but make sure that we invest in business that are alike and not just ones that are not connected in any way?
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The pool that's ever shrinking is time left and... the hard thing is deciding what to actually do with it that will be meaningful and make you feel fulfilled. Values have spread over quite the range and it's not simple anymore. Not following the will of the tribe, the king, the great leader, you have too many choices. Too many to make one.
Thus, attention wanders and never finds home.