How easily are you distracted?
According to a study done by Microsoft — in the year 2000, the average attention span was 12 seconds. Today, the average attention span is closer to 8 seconds.
If you fall within this statistical majority, you have already been distracted once (or possibly twice) since reading this email.
We live in a world saturated with information, distractions, and push notifications which war for our attention. However, to leave a legacy, we need to fight through distractions to give our best attention to what deserves our most focused efforts.
Increasing focus and productivity begins with understanding your brain's wiring.
In his book, "Boundaries for Leaders," Dr. Henry Cloud talks about the three executive functions of the brain. These are attending, inhibiting, and remembering. Utilizing these three functions to their fullest extent, makes us more productive. To most effectively utilize these three functions, Dr. Cloud proposes three questions:
What structures, disciplines, and practices make sure that you are attending to what is most important?
What processes do you have in place that are inhibiting what is disruptive, irrelevant, or destructive?
How do you keep people or yourself conscious of what you need to be conscious of in order to make it all work?
In the video below, I'll walk you through some of the ways I exercise each of these three functions to become more productive — and how you can develop tools and systems to give your best attention to what matters most.
