DBR 079: Work-life Balance Is Nothing (… but an Attention Management Problem)

This episode is about the outcomes you can achieve with the information and coaching I am able to give.

This is important, because it’s gonna be work. It’s not hard work but it is work. You’ll need to change a couple of thought patterns and build a new habit or two.

And in order for you to do that work, you need to know what’s in it for you: what’s going to happen when you do it.

I’ll talk about what other clients have experienced as they’ve adopted this attention management mindset.

The goal is nothing short of making you a better worker and making your life easier. That’s two things, not one that depends on the other. What I mean is not that your life’s going to be easier because you’re a better worker. It’s two things. Work’s going to be easier to deal with and life’s going to be easier to deal with.

Outcome: better work/life balance 

• One of the primary pressures on productivity is the notion of work-life balance
• We’re doers of many things in both work and life spheres
• So, we have two claims on our attention
• A third primary claim on our attention – entertainment. It’s attention-consuming.

Attention is the primary constraint in modern life

• The bottleneck on ‘productivity’ is our ability to pay attention to getting things done
• Our work is very much mental work
• What is it we get better at with attention management?
• Parallel to athleticism in sports
• General education – things that apply to all work
• Underlying even that are abilities that allow us to perform work well
• We need to develop skills to have our attention where it needs to be when we need for it to be there. There’s simply not a word for it in the English language.

Attention helps us with the “infinite number” of things that we’ve got to do

• If we don’t handle that set of things very well, they absorb too much of our attention
• We need a concept of wasted attention
• If we get better at both work and life (independently), then we’ve got more space to “balance” the two.
• We come to see that they are not automatically in competition all the time

Other outcomes that we can expect

• You’ll get better at your work, regardless of what you do.
• The important notion of “deliverables” and why attention is critical
• Better opportunities in your career
• Better at tasks that constitute ‘life’
• Better at learning, the most basic knowledge work skill

An aside on the stress related to competition

• Corporate world: competition for promotion
• Sales: competition with other products/solutions
• Our business schools are focused on models of industry competitiveness
• Economics teaches us scarcity and competition.
• If we know we’re more skilled, we can face competition with less fear and stress

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