I want to focus. I want to narrow down the things I think about, the things I am paying (notice the verb) attention to. Such things are receiving my attention like money that I am paying to them. The question is, what am I getting in return for my "investment"? It seems as though the broader the base, the larger the group of diverse items, that I pay my attention to, the less any of them can give me back. Another way of putting it is that I can only pay a little to each one at a time; therefore they can't give me much at a time.

So last night, in the dark, I pulled out my little notebook, the one I consider "disposable," for short-term to-do lists, grocery lists, and the like, and wrote something a little more important in it. I will copy it below, for posterity's sake.

10:37pm, 5-16-07
Narrow Down your focus
- Technology - Learn
- Music - Practice
- Theology - Learn
--------------------------------
- Philosophy - Learn
- Science - Learn
- Writing - Practice
--------------------------------
- Websites
- Self
- Family
- Others
I don't want to waste my free time by having too many options.
*************

I enjoy reading stuff on the Net. I enjoy surfing endlessly, finding new things to learn about and read about. But I've felt for a long, long time that somehow it wasn't right, or at least wasn't the Best thing I could be doing.

That sense was nudged again the other day when I found an article titled "Simple Productivity: 10 Ways to Do More by Focusing on the Essentials." I skimmed through the ten points very briefly at one point, then left the tab up to look at again later. So I did review the page at a couple of later times. The last time I looked over it, I felt like it was saying a lot of "obvious" stuff. At that point I remembered the "productivity" part of the title, not the rest, and I thought, "this is just a number of different ways of saying "focus more!"

A quote:

The problem is that we are overloaded with information and tasks, and we try to get everything done instead of just the most essential things. Solution: focus on only the essential, eliminate the rest, and allow yourself to get into that beautiful state known as “flow”.

And although it can be hard to give up all the busy-ness that we’ve grown accustomed to, the change will have tremendous benefits on our sanity, our stress levels, our happiness, and yes, our productivity.

And the titles of the ten points:

1. Clear your head.
2. Focus on the essential tasks.
3. Eliminate the rest.
4. Do essential tasks first.
5. Eliminate distractions.
6. Use simple tools.
7. Do one thing at a time.
8. Find quiet.
9. Make the most of your work.
10. Simplify some more.

Another post that fed into this line of thought came from a recent Signal vs. Noise post. The post quoted from and summarized a book called Bit Literacy, the basic gist of which is "in an age of infinite bits, time and attention are the scarce resources." There was a lot of good stuff in the post, but this quote jumped out at me:

(Hurst cites Richard Saul Wurman who wrote, “One of the most anxiety-inducing side effects of the information era is the feeling that you have to know it all. Realizing your own limitations becomes essential to surveying an information avalanche; you cannot or should not absorb or even pay attention to everything.”) So question everything.

Maintaining a healthy media diet requires vigilance about what you’re consuming. Thus it’s important to constantly ask the question, “Is this worth my time?” at every level: the source (“Is this source worth my time?”), a particular issue of the source, an article, even down to the paragraph or section of an article you’re in. If the answer is “no” to any of these, skip it. Move to the next article, or trash the entire issue; and if it happens too often with one source, consider removing it from the lineup altogether.

At times it hits me: just as the arrogant of the twentieth century, who were over-keenly aware of their society's advances in knowledge and technical capability, thought inherently less of the ancients and prehistorics, thought they were inherently stupider than us latecomers, so it seems that we've continued the hubris to believe that we, with our "infinite bits," are superior to those (who included ourselves) just ten years ago who didn't even have the Internet at all, let alone at super-high speeds. At times it hits me: it's not a bad thing to sit down and read a book.

It's an odd thought, that. A book. An entire, long-reading, long-attention-span book. Maybe even by a single author! I am so used to rapid-fire, just-a-few-paragraphs content, from multiple sources and multiple authors, that it seems actually odd to think of stopping the machine-gun consumption of data long enough to read even a chapter of a real-live book.

But maybe that's just me. In any case, all these influences have pushed me to try and focus more, to stop trying to read every new thing that comes down the pike. Now that I've read about it, journaled about it, and blogged about it, I need to do it.