Maximizing Your Resources

The greatest resource we all have is time. The second greatest is attention. What you spend most of your time doing will impact your energy levels. What you spend most of your time attending to will impact your happiness the greatest. We can all do the math and figure out that most of us spend half of our time sleeping and working. When we do the math, most of us write our workdays off as completely dedicated to work. We then give work most of our attention on our days off. What would it be like if we treated our mental space and focus as precious and worked to protect it? Most people need a little help to make this shift. It begins with reflecting on how much strategy and preparation your job actually requires. If your job has no upward mobility, then it should be a minimally invasive job. If you have upward mobility and are working your way up the ladder, that is a very different thing – as is running your own business.

When we consider our time and attention allocations, we rarely take into account what we expect our return on investment to be. How many aspects of your job can be automated either technically or habitually? There are aspects of every job that take less time the longer we are in the job. There are also aspects of every job that are critical and not so critical. Have you done time accounting and attention analysis? Is your job taking up all of your mental space? No job should do that no matter how high up the ladder you climb. For jobs with a lot of tasks that can become reflective and do not require any overtime, it quickly becomes clear when we are spending too much time obsessing over our job. For executives, it is a bit different because part of the job does require focus outside of the office.

For executives, strategically using vacation time and having one day a week in which we decompress is vitally important. We all need to be able to unplug, and knowing what needs our attention and what does not will free up a great deal of attention. Work-life balance is about how much time off the clock we spend thinking about work. Finding an activity that takes up as much mental space as work is sometimes the only way to decompress. Finding a team activity usually helps pull focus away from work no matter what level our job is. Having a well rounded life takes effort. It also takes being honest with yourself. What pulls your attention and how much attention does work truly require? Knowing that you want to decompress and take back custody of your mental space is step one. The next step is to find activities that pull your attention so that you can shift your focus. Team activities won’t be the right for everyone. Following your passion usually is.