Work-life Balance Is Nothing (... but an Attention Management Problem) - DBR 079
Episode 79
This episode is about the outcomes you can achieve with the information and coaching I am able to give.
This is important, because it's gonna be work. It's not hard work but it is work. You'll need to change a couple of thought patterns and build a new habit or two.
And in order for you to do that work, you need to know what's in it for you: what's going to happen when you do it.
I’ll talk about what other clients have experienced as they've adopted this attention management mindset.
The goal is nothing short of making you a better worker and making your life easier. That's two things, not one that depends on the other. What I mean is not that your life's going to be easier because you're a better worker. It's two things. Work's going to be easier to deal with and life's going to be easier to deal with.
Outcome: better work/life balance
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One of the primary pressures on productivity is the notion of work life balance
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We’re doers of many things in both work and life spheres
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So, we have two claims on our attention
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A third primary claim on our attention - entertainment. It's attention consuming.
Attention is the primary constraint in modern life
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The bottleneck on on 'productivity' is our ability to pay attention to getting things done
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Our work is very much mental work
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What is it we get better at with attention management?
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Parallel to athleticism in sports
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General education - things that apply to all work
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Underlying even that are abilities that allow us to perform work well
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We need to develop skills to have our attention where it needs to be when we need for it to be there. There's simply not a word for it in the English language.
Attention helps us with the "infinite number" of things that we've got to do
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If we don't handle that set of things very well they absorb too much of our attention
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We need a concept of wasted attention
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If we get better at both work and life (independently), then we’ve got more space to “balance” the two.
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We come to see that they are not automatically in competition all the time
Other outcomes that we can expect
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You'll get better at your work, regardless of what you do.
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The important notion of "deliverables" and why attention is critical
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Better opportunities in your career
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Better at tasks that constitute 'life'
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Better at learning, the most basic knowledge work skill
Published on 3 weeks ago