focus and attention
The mind is our greatest asset and challenging while we are traversing each day. Some days we are highly effective and other days we are floundering idiots. My quarrel has always been that I’d be a floundering idiot when I truly only wanted to be effective. Why is this? Did I not wake up on the right side of the bed on those days? I think its probably a misunderstanding of the nature of the mind and it’s ability to allocate attention.
Here are the 3 ideas I will briefly muse about: • Todo Lists are biological structures for selecting attention
• Showers are great ways to refocus your attention
• Do not create a goal in a mood
Todo Lists are biological structures for selecting attention Human brains are wonderfully complex machines that are bewilderingly complex for even the beholder to understand. It operates to form the illusion that is the world that you perceive. It’s operation while you are awake is largely geared towards handling things you do through time. It’s often hard for people to accurately gauge how long they will be able to take to perform any and most operations. Thus we’ve learned different modes of handling those operations.
a. don’t handle time, let time handle you
b. create a calendar and work at handling time through it
c. create a todo list each day and work from there
Because time in a day is limited. Because the mind without any concrete goal has a tendency towards chaotically handling time. Because each day comes with its own set of challenges. I believe it behooves us as productive people to utilize the todo list to extend the mind’s ability to handle time. This organizing after effect of a todo list, leads me to believe that it is not merely useful as a simple piece of paper/stickie or digital record but it’s real nature is that of an abstract product of focus/attention. You can fold the mind into neat sections physically through having a list of todo items. Of course this is a hypothesis, but through my own experience I can clearly recall moments of complete and utter focus when simply knocking off todos vs not having todos and trying to guess at which next thing is most important to tackle.
Showers are great ways to refocus your attention If you wake up in the morning and you begin with a clear plan in your mind, you are more likely to achieve all of the items for the day. This is a clear fact, and points to the usefulness of having morning routines. But what about those days, where you get knocked off your feet (mentally, some unforeseen event occurs) or you simply finish all of your goals and feel a satisfaction that leads you to stop everything. Perhaps you can restart your mind by taking a shower or going for a walk in the park.
Do not create a goal in a mood This is important not to do. I suspect that long term goals are useless. Not that you shouldn’t have them, but that you shouldn’t start anything with it. Still trying to figure this out but this is what I have so far.