What are the two most valuable personal resources in the world today? If you answered power and money, I wouldn't blame you; that's what pop culture and cable news suggest with their coverage of Washington and Wall Street every day. Maybe wealth and influence aren't everything in life, though. I've come to believe that the most precious of personal assets are time and attention.
Not sure you agree? Let me make my case. Our energy level is renewable from food, sleep and, as I've learned, iced mochas. Looks fade. Celebrity waxes and wanes. Health is a negative commodity -- which is a fancy way of saying that we don't value it until we lose it (like Tony Romo for Cowboys fans).
Time, it seems to me, is the ultimate currency. It's the only non-renewable strategic resource. Money can be earned or printed; power can be lost and gained; but time, once elapsed, can never be regained. One of my good friends -- who lives on the beach in Southern California and drives a Tesla, two conventional signs of success -- went so far as to say the other day that "time has become the true luxury."
Our time is precious but we don't always treat it as such. How many hours did you spend online this week, for instance? If you're typical, it was 23, according to a recent report. I'm worse than average, which means that I will allocate over 1,200 hours this year -- the equivalent of 150 eight-hour days -- to reading the New York Times...but also checking out YouTube.
How about TV watching? I try to limit myself to 10 hours a week (the Canadian average is 30!). I succeed most of the time, but with football season now in full swing -- and my beloved Habs getting their start in October, I'm not confident I'll keep that discipline.
Web or channel surfing are not complete wastes of time, to be sure. I learn a fair deal in my online reading and I get pleasure from cheering on my favorite teams. But are these the best uses of this precious resource?
And what about attention? First, let me be clear about what I mean by that term. Attention is another way of saying "focus." You give your attention to someone when you listen to them fully, and to some activity when you do it without simultaneously trying to do another (forget the myth of "multitasking"; in almost every instance you think you're pulling it off, you're not).
Why is it so important? Every action we take requires our attention for it to be successful or significant. The problem is that there have never been more things tugging at our attention. Right now, I bet you're feeling the pull of that tweet, that txt message, or that other tab on your browser bar. Later, when you're offline, will you be fully engaged in your son's hockey game if you're also on the phone with a friend?
The opposite of attention is distraction, and I find myself distracted a lot these days. More often, I suffer from the very modern, omnipresent variant of this mind state a Microsoft executive once called "continuous partial attention."
There is a titanic struggle for our time and attention -- not just from within us, but also by the people and products that dominate our external world. Your boss demands them. Your husband and kids want them. Google and Facebook fight over them. HBO and CNN take turns attracting them. Writers like me need them to survive.
Your time and attention are clearly valuable economic commodities. But have we put the right price on these two prized possessions? After all, they're both limited, scarce and -- whether we're conscious of it or not -- involve trade-offs. That 10 minutes I spent pressing the snooze button is the same 10 minutes that I could use right now to get to that breakfast meeting on time. Did that lunch with your friend yesterday feel a bit unsatisfying because they were checking their iPhone every time there was a beep?
More philosophically, nothing is possible without them. You can have all the money in the world, but if you don't have time to enjoy it you'll become the richest man in the cemetery. You might find yourself in front of the most beautiful sunset, but if you don't direct your attention there...it might as well have been cloudy.
This notion that time and attention are the critical metrics has the added virtue of being fundamentally democratic. We all get the same amount of both (though you could quibble that the rich can buy more leisure by outsourcing work to others). Still we all get our allotted time on Earth -- no more, no less. Life isn't a Justin Timberlake sci-fi movie, after all.
So, assuming I'm right, how can we make this insight not just interesting but important? Quite simply, we have to reframe the way we look at both time and attention. Systems like GTD and websites like Lifehacker have created a cottage industry of "productivity porn" to help you "manage" time. I think that's the wrong metaphor. You can't actually administer time -- you can only invest it. That goes for attention as well.
It helps me to think of time and attention that way -- in terms of intentional decisions, returns and what economists call opportunity costs. Before you do something, ask the counter-question: what else can I do with that time or focus? What is the most valuable investment of my time and attention right now?
I struggle with this every day -- often multiple times a day. But I force myself to think of the big picture not just from time to time, but all the time. Deciding what to focus on and when are two of the biggest challenges we face today. We can all be more mindful and intentional about investing these two most precious resources on those people and projects that are most important to us.
If you've read this far, you've given me the gift of your time and attention. Thank you; I know exactly how valuable that is. Do you?