When you give something your attention, just how much attention do you give it?
I said in my first book Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play that the key to dealing with any task, problem, challenge or project is to give it the amount of focused attention that it needs. You can’t succeed if you don’t give it your attention. Or if that attention is not focussed, or if you don’t give it sufficient attention.
That is one of the reasons why it is so important to make sure that you don’t take on more things than you are able to give that sort of attention to.
When you do give something your attention, it starts to move. But it doesn’t always move in the way you expect it to. For instance a couple of years ago, I decided to make this website produce a lot of income. I expected the income to come from advertisements. But in fact what I found was that advertisements were hard work. What instead I found was that the website was an excellent way of attracting firms and organisations which wanted in-house time management training, and also for selling my own seminars.
So giving my attention to the website did indeed produce excellent results, but they weren’t quite the ones I was looking for. This is quite normal: when things begin to move new opportunities start opening up all the time. That’s a good reason why plans should never be so rigid that you can’t adapt to the new opportunities.
One note of caution though: don’t think that just because something is a good opportunity that you therefore have to take it. Taking on opportunities indiscriminately is a fine way to dilute your attention, not focus it.