Who's stolen your mind today?

In time of uncertainty we are more careful with how we spend our money, when time is tight we try our best to spend that wisely too. But there’s something that is often a little more subtle, something we are not always aware of, that is constantly being stolen. 

That thing is our Attention. Our brains get hijacked by something or someone else, that may or may not be more interesting or beneficial to us than what we are doing right now in the moment.

 Let me give you some examples of where my attention was taken this week:

 1.    Something has just happened right now. I’m sat at my home office today and my wife (who shares the office with me) has just told me that friends are visiting soon so can I add the dates to my calendar.

 Now where was I?

2.    Ah yes number 2. Here’s a weird one. Personalised car number plates. Whenever I’m walking along and I see one, they send me down a rabbit hole of thoughts. What does it try to spell or abbreviate? Why would they have one? What are they really trying to say? Should I be getting one too? What would mine say? 

My head can get a little overactive, this type of things may be something you wouldn’t have even given a second thought to, but my wired brain does.

3.    Here’s another one where my attention has wandered whilst writing Point 2. I thought I removed all notification sounds from Facebook Messenger but my phone has just made a subtle noise, which of course I need to now go and check out. It was a reply to a message I had sent this morning about going to a football match on Saturday. It’s now sent me down a myriad of thoughts….Ok my friend isn’t now going so who should me and my daughter go with? On our own? With someone else? Where shall I park as I’ve not been before? The message also said that the team are not playing very well, so will we have fun at the game?

So I was hoping to give you examples from this week, but I’ve managed to find three from the last hour. It has however now given me an idea. I’m going to keep a log of my daily “stolen attention”. Hopefully some of the things will be positive as well as negative. I’ll start to share them here on the blog, to help get you thinking about your own attention.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Horace…..“Rule your mind, or it will rule you”.

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