Time Management Expert, Event Speaker: Mark Lamendola
 

Time Tips: Manage Your Attention Span Tip #4

Many people are taking Ritalin or chugging high-caffeine sodas to boost their flagging attention spans. While this does get the desired results, the downside can be tremendous. With any "upper," there's always a pronounced "down" period. You are essentially mortgaging some resource in your body and will have to pay it back with interest.

Of course, drinking sodas is just plain stupid. Unless, of course, you have a passion for osteoporosis and esophageal cancer. Call me old-fashioned, but I'm partial to my bones and my esophagus. So I don't consume sodas. To each his own.

A better way to address the physical side of low attention span is to fix the causes. Merely addressing the symptoms is not a sustainable strategy. So, what are the causes?

  1. Sleep deprivation is the #1 cause of low attention span. See Mindconnection's sleep course to address this. When you are 20% sleep-deprived, you have the mental acuity of a person who is drunk. The typical American is actually below that level, and doesn't even realize there's a problem. Get your rest, and you can ditch the Ritalin.
     
  2. Poor diet means a poorly performing brain. See the free diet information at www.supplecity.com.
     
  3. A disruptive environment ruins concentration. If you need to focus, get make your environment as quiet as possible. If you can't get away from noisy people, then wear earplugs.
     
  4. Lack of practice is another major cause. If you're not doing things that require concentration, you lose your ability to concentrate. Use it or lose it. Most people, in today's sound bite world, have chosen to lose it.
     

There are other physical and non-physical causes of poor attention span (including thinking about problems rather than compartmentalizing so you can be in the moment). To identify all of the thing that interfere with your concentration, keep a notepad handy. When something disturbs you, make a note of it. As time permits, work on this list.

 

 
A great way many businesses are managing time is using software. There are many forms of time and attendance software which allows managers to track and monitor employees time usage.
 

More thoughts on time management

The phrase "time management" is an unfortunate language quirk. You can't really manage time. It just is. You can't gain time, create time, or even lose time. Time is what it is, regardless of what we do.

It would be better to say "time allocation" or "activity management" "time usage" or some other phraseology to indicate that it's not time itself you're managing but how you use the time that exists. But we'll use the common terminology here to avoid confusion.

Some things time management is not:

  • Being more efficient. Suppose you become very efficient at making buggy whips. Does this fact mean you are managing your time well?
  • Getting more done in a given amount of time. Getting more done of what? And to what degree of quality? If you rake the leaves on a lawn from one side to the other all day long, does that mean you are a good time manager?
  • Being able to juggle multiple priorities. Instead of juggling priorities, assign priorities. First tend to the urgent things, then the most important things.
  • Mastering multi-tasking. This concept conflicts with what we know about the human brain. If you buy into this self-defeating, time-wasting, quality-killing ideology, you might also be interested in practicing solo flight by flapping your arms frantically.
  • Working faster. No, this mode is how you make mistakes that you subsequently have to spend more time fixing.

Some things good time management involves:

  • Deciding what to do. This is trickier than it sounds. Which is why there are time management experts.
  • Deciding what not to do. This is even trickier than deciding what to do. Which is why there are time managers and why discipline is a huge, huge factor in accomplishing this.
  • Deciding what to do when, and in what order. In essence, prioritization.
  • Determining the scope, goals, and metrics for each activity you undertake. In this area, we the find most room for improvement. Precision here allows you to avoid waste on the one hand, and falling short on the other.
  • Planning out the work, task, project, or activity such that you determine the necessary steps to quality completion. That is, what must you do to meet the intended goal and quality metrics?
  • Identifying unnecessary steps. Get this right, and you can cut your wasted hours significantly.
  • Figuring out what resources to use. Not all resources applicable to a task are equal. Picking the right tool for the job saves time, improves quality, and makes life less stressful.

We've highlighted only some of the factors involved in good time management. We actually teach extreme time management, which is a methodology that allows you to make effective use of your time almost second nature. You don't need a complicated system. Our system puts many of the variables on autopilot, so you have more time to do what you need to do. Our system goes way beyond most other systems in results, yet is far simpler.

Contact us for a presentation to your organization: comments @ mindconnection.com (remove the spaces after pasting into your e-mail client's "to" box.