023: Paying with your Life

what it really means to pay attention.

#time #attention #planning

Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life. -

Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman

We are used to thinking about time management, this typically meant getting our physical bodies to physical places at the appropriate times to do things like, work, play, learn etc.

But as we move less and less. And ‘work from home’ more and more. Me might need a more nuance way of thinking about time.

We don’t just need to manage strategies for managing our time, we need strategies for managing our attention.

I don’t know if time is money. But I can buy into the idea that attention is life.

Narrow the Gap

What are somethings that you can pay less attention to?

I started paying attention to football again last year after a 10 year break. But I’ve decided to go back to ignoring it. And I estimate that will give me 624 hours of attention to spend on something else in 2023. If there are things in your life that you want to pay attention to, you have to take them from the things you are currently paying attention too.