The Essential Resource We’re All Wasting

What we attend to creates our lives—attention is the most essential human resource, fundamental to our lives, to our relationships, and our quality of work.

Sergey Nivens/Adobe Stock

We need to talk. Not just you and me, but all of us. None of us are connecting like we once did. We’re more distracted and the conversations aren’t as rich. It’s zoom meetings. It’s distance. It’s many things. But it all amounts to us not working through the tough stuff like we did before. The intense focus that was once there seems to have gone. With it went the satisfaction that comes from deep thinking.

Instead, what’s there now is an incessant feeling of being off-balance and leaving things half-baked. We’re more edgy and reactive, scattered and less in-tune. It’s starting to feel like a new normal and that can’t be good. We need to talk to get things back on track. What I’m talking about is how we’re using our attention.

Managing Attention: The Next Challenge

We’ve been neglecting attention and now it’s become one of our most essential challenges. Why? How we manage our attention drives how we manage ourselves. How we manage our collective attention drives collective performance and with it sustained success.

The implication for anyone who manages people is clear. As work orients towards information and knowledge, as the number of inputs and distractions…