Paying attention, the new secret of success

January 3rd, 2009

Via Lifehacker, the argument that in the modern online age, the ability to focus is the new work ethic.  Distractions like Twitter, blogs, social  networks, online news, etc. all compete for our attention.  The ability to tune them out and get some work done is the new definition of “hard work” – something very different from what our parents thought of as “hard work.”

Work Ethic 2.0: Attention Control, by Mike Egan

As I type this I have six tabs open in Firefox, Mail.app in the background, Twitterfic in my menu bar, Adium logged onto five IM networks, and iTunes downloading three podcasts. I know a lot of programmers and such who pride ourselves on being about work on mutiple projects at the same time, but perhaps we also need to be sure we can get focus in on something without any distractions .


Posted in General | Comments (1)

 

One Response to “Paying attention, the new secret of success”

  1. Nuke says:
    1/14/2009 at 12:34 pm

    I think it behooves us to be able to focus on things that need it, but that not everything takes 100% of our attention. The push to multitasking and “doing more with less” mean that many times by default you have more than one thing going. And once you get used to it, you end up reading blogs/articles, twittering, or e-mailing to fill make use of the rest of your brain. Or something like that…