There Is No More Or Less Time | Don't Let Your Attention Slide

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1:29Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words in to works.

2:09There is no more or less time. Three years now from those eerie and strange days of the early pandemic, one thing that strikes us is how much time we seem to have then. People were picking up hobbies, slow cooking elaborate meals on the groceries they could get. People found that jobs that used to keep them late at the office could be finished in a few hours. People were reading philosophy and zipping through books. There was no business travel, no long days on the road. The days blurred into each other, but there seemed to be infinite space for chatting with friends and family over Zoom, catching up on TV series that we'd missed.

2:44It was the best of times. It was the worst of times, but it sure felt like there was a lot of time. Today, with life back to normal, that can all seem very far away. Where did all that time go? How are we suddenly so much busier? They're still the same 24 hours in a day, but somehow we're rushed. Everything is sped up. Those hobbies, those meandering catch-ups and the calls have fallen away like the COVID case counts. What gives? Sure, part of it is how the world got paused, but most of it is much simpler. In the midst of a crisis, a lot of things fell away. We had clarity. Marcus Aurelius would say that the essential question of life was to ask ourselves whether the things we were doing were in fact essential.

3:24Eliminating the inessential created room, he said, to do the essential things better. We still have the same number of hours in the day, but our sense of clarity is gone. Our priorities have slipped. We're saying yes to things that the lockdowns and protocols and flattening the curve said no to for us. And much of this stuff is wonderful, seeing friends in person, taking our kids to and from school, for example. But a lot of not. A lot of it is waste. A lot of it is inessential. We can go back to living in that moment anytime we like. We have all the time in the world we need to be productive, philosophical, and purposeful.

4:01We just have to seize it. We just have to be disciplined about it. And that is what Discipline is Destiny is all about, which you can grab anywhere books are sold. And we've got some signed copies in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com. You can also grab signed copies if you ever swing by the painted porch here in Bastrop, Texas, my little bookstore on Main Street in Texas. But if you haven't read Discipline is Destiny, it makes a great audiobook, ebook, whatever. But I hope you like it.

4:34Don't let your attention slide. It's April 21st. This is today's entry from The Daily Stoic. When you let your attention slide for a bit, don't think you will get a grip on it whenever you wish. Instead, bear in mind that because of today's mistake, everything that follows will be necessarily worse. Is it possible to be free from error? Not by any means, but it is possible for a person to be always stretching to avoid error. For we must be content to at least escape a few mistakes by never letting our attention slide. That's Epictetus' is discourses. Winford Gallagher in her book Wrapped quotes David Meyer, a cognitive scientist at the University of Michigan.

5:17Einstein didn't invent the theory of relativity while he was multitasking at the Swiss patent office, because in truth it came after when he really had time to focus and study. Attention matters. And in an era where our attention is being fought for by every new app, every website, every article, every book, every tweet, and every post, the value of attention has only gone up. Part of what Epictetus is saying here is that attention is a habit, and that letting your attention slip and wander builds bad habits and enables mistakes. You'll never complete all your tasks if you allow yourself to be distracted by every tiny interruption.

5:55Your attention is one of your most critical resources. Don't squander it. There's a quote I was using from Epictetus in my new book about discipline where I'm talking about focus. And Epictetus basically says, is anything improved by inattention? Does anything get better by only half focusing? Does that ever produce good work? And the answer is no, it doesn't. Attention is everything. Attention is the prime resource. You know how you know attention is worth something? because of all of the people who are not just competing for it, but building multi-billion dollars, or in the case of Facebook, trillion dollar businesses on top of it.

6:37Attention is the most scarce resource in the world. This is based on our time, first and foremost, right? It's based on this non-renewable resource, which is our life, which, as Seneca says, is always tick, tick, ticking away. you've got to think about your attention as something to protect something to spend wisely and as my friend cal newport who i've had on the podcast a bunch of times and he wrote two great books which i highly recommend digital minimalism and deep work you can check out deep work in the painted porch bookstore love it i'll link to it in today's episode but to me deep work is the ability to focus to control your attention to lock it in on something and not be thrown off it not be pushed off of it.

7:21Basically, Cal says, if you think you're a good multitasker, you're bullshitting yourself because you're not. Nobody is a good multitasker. You think like you're switching between tasks. Like, like for instance, as I was recording this, because I forgot to put my phone on, on do not disturb it. I got a spam call and you might've noticed that little glitch where I was talking. And even though it only took me a half second to turn it off, it's going to take a second longer than I would like to admit for me to come back to being fully engaged in this conversation that we're having. Now, thankfully, this isn't a super taxing thing to do, but imagine that I did that a lot of times over the course of writing a book.

8:03Imagine if I did that a lot of times over the course of my relationship with my kids, which we all do. It takes a toll. It adds up. The more you can focus, the more you can lock in, the less you can let your attention slide, the better. As Epictetus is saying, is it possible to never do that? No, right? It is impossible to be free of error, to always be locked in, to never be distracted. But we must be content to limit it as much as possible. Everything that follows from that place of distraction, from letting your attention slide, from focusing on the wrong thing, from letting yourself get riled up, letting yourself get sucked down the rabbit hole, letting yourself go into doom scrolling mode.

8:45What comes out of the other side of that is not as good as the alternative. The conversation you have is not as good. The work that comes out of it is not as good. The connection between you and your kid or your wife or whomever is not as good. When you let your attention slide, there is a cost. That switching it creates a residue. It creates a lag, creates a glitch, and it adds up. You have to understand that it adds up. So lock in, create boundaries. Like that's what the do not disturb mode on the phone is for. It's why I usually put it face down in the other part of the room. It's why I don't have alerts on my phone.

9:20It's why even the fact that it was only vibrating on the table, it was less disruptive than that super loud ringtone that can sort of pierce the silence of a room. You got to create focus. You got to create space. You can't let your attention slide. Your attention is the most important thing. You only get this moment once. Don't waste it being distracted. Don't waste it by being only half present. You have to focus.

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