It is not how much you have, its how you use it.
This is true. Partially.
Because while it is important to use resources effectively, you have to have some resources to use to begin with. And, while it is possible to do a lot with a little in some circumstances, the amount is always going to broaden or narrow the opportunities available. And, this is why "how you use it" is so important.
A colleague and I were talking about this today in regard to the team I am in, where while we have a massive amount of things on our plate, I feel that we are too diluted and spread too thin. This means that we don't have as much impact as we could, but also, things are very hard to manage and connect activities up with each other to compound against one another. Things move forward across multiple fronts, but it is slow going and there is a lot of wastage.
While slow and steady might win the race, in businesses where conditions and needs are quite fluid, taking too long to get something accomplished will see its need wane, and the early work superseded. It is like half building a house, and then changing the design. Or, the analogy I gave to my colleague was starting five house projects, when there is only money to cover one of them. Getting five twenty percent done, doesn't add value at all.
Too many irons in the fire. Smothers the fire.
When it comes to investing, it is good to diversify. However, spreading a little here and there in unconnected vehicles is unlikely to yield much. Some might go up very high, but most will just go nowhere for a loss. An indexed fund however is spreading out across many, but keeping them connected. Again, it won't yield astronomical highs, but it is mitigates the risk of loss.
Resource allocation is vital across pretty much everything we find important to us, because everything we find important requires resources. Love might be free, but don't spend enough time with the ones we love and that love will fade, as people drift apart. Time is of course one of the most valuable resources.
Right?
I would posit that time isn't that valuable at all, because it doesn't actually do anything to have or not have it. An individual can have all the time in the world, but if they have nothing to do within that time, what is the point of having it?
What I consider the most valuable resource we have at our disposable, is our attention. Where we put our attention will heavily affect our experience at every level of our lives. And, because we live in an attention economy, all businesses and governments, are vying for our attention in order to meet their agenda of increasing their own wealth and control.
But, like all resources, our attention is limited, as even if we have the time on our hands, our brains just can't handle that much. The average adult can spend around 15-20 minutes on an activity before attention wavers. However, even that isn't the problem. Because when it comes to pure attention, we can only concentrate for about 8 seconds, before it wavers. Supposedly, less than a goldfish - though I am not sure how they tested the fish. This 8 seconds of pure attention used to be 12 seconds twenty years ago, which means that we are fifty percent worse than we were.
Going back to what we were talking about in regards to spreading resources to thin across too many areas and getting nothing of value accomplished - consider social media streams. Watch people scroll through at a rapid pace, from one topic to another, getting the feeling that they are getting value, but actually doing nothing at all. It isn't the time spent that is the biggest problem with the obsessive thumbing behavior, it is the loss of attention.
That attention could be spent on more valuable content, content that supports improvement, or hobbies, or actually applying methods to build skills and habits. But instead, it is being sucked away, into a void, for zero return.
I sound a lot like my grandad, a grumpy old man who would call the TV the "idiot box", but was he wrong? The TV didn't come with us in the past, we had to go outside without it, catch the bus without it, shop without it and go to school without it. Now though, the idiot box is always with us, always connected, and always showing exactly what we want to see, when we want to see it, wherever we happen to be.
And it is designed to capture our attention to the point we feel compelled to keep giving more of our opportunity to it. And the more we give, the less we have to spend on noticing what we are giving up in order to feed it. We get the sense of progression, yet move nowhere.
This article is about 1000 words and you might have read or skimmed through it, looking for something of interest or to comment upon. However, did you pay attention all the way through to the article, or did your thoughts wander, find other memories to feed upon, other threads in your mind to pull? Is there a difference in your thoughts when reading an article like this, or scrolling five minutes of Instagram?
We often talk about how valuable our time is;
Yet give our attention away for free.
If you comment here, you might get paid.
But who is paying attention?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
