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I was late for my meeting with the CEO of a technology company and I was emailing him from my iPhone as I walked onto the elevator in his company’s office building. I stayed focused on the screen as I rode to the sixth floor. I was still typing with my thumbs when the elevator doors opened and I walked out without looking up, not realizing I had gotten off on the fourth floor instead of the sixth. Then I heard a voice behind me: “Wrong floor.” I looked back at the man who was holding the door open for me to get back in; it was the CEO, a big smile on his face. He had been in the elevator with me the whole time. “Busted,” he said.
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The world is moving fast and it’s only getting faster. So much technology. So much information. So much to understand, to think about, to react to.
So we try to speed up to match the pace of the action around us. We stay up until 3 AM trying to answer all our emails. We tweet, we Facebook, and we link in. We scan news websites wanting to make sure we stay up to date on the latest updates. And we salivate each time we hear the beep or vibration of a new text message.
But that’s a mistake. The speed with which information hurtles toward us is unavoidable. And it’s getting worse. So trying to catch it all is counterproductive.
The faster the waves come, the more deliberately we need to navigate. Otherwise we’ll get tossed around like so many particles of sand, scattered to oblivion. Never before has it been so important to be grounded and intentional and to know what’s important.
Never before has it been so important to say “no.” No, I’m not going to read that article. No, I’m not going to read that email. No, I’m not going to take that phone call. No, I’m not going to sit through that meeting.
It’s hard to do because maybe, just maybe, that next piece of information will be the key to our success. But our success actually hinges on the opposite: on our willingness to risk missing some information. Because trying to focus on it all is a risk in itself. We’ll exhaust ourselves. We’ll get confused, nervous, and irritable. And we’ll miss the CEO standing next to us in the elevator.
A study of car accidents by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute put cameras in cars to see what happens right before an accident. They found that in 80 percent of crashes, the drivers were distracted during the three seconds preceding the incident. In other words, they lost focus—made a call, changed the station on the radio, took a bite of a sandwich, checked a text—and didn’t notice that something changed in the world around them. Then they crashed.
And since, in our daily lives, the world around us is constantly changing, we’ll almost certainly crash unless we stay focused on the road ahead and resist the distractions that, while tempting, are, well, distracting.
Now is a good time to pause, prioritize, and focus. In the last chapter, “Bird by Bird,” we looked at how to structure your to-do list using your five (or so) big things to focus on for the year. That list will help you focus on the road ahead. It will keep your attention on what you are trying to achieve, what makes you happy, what’s important to you. That’s the list to design your time around.
But we’re not done with lists. There’s another list that’s useful to create: your ignore list.
To succeed in using your time wisely, you have to ask a few more—equally important but often avoided—complementary questions: What are you willing not to achieve? What doesn’t make you happy? What’s not important to you? What gets in the way?
Some people already have the first list—a to-do list—though there’s usually too much on it. Very few have the second—the ignore list. But given how easily we get distracted and how many distractions we have these days, the second is more important than ever. The people who will continue to thrive in the future know the answers to these questions, and each time there’s a demand on their attention, they ask whether it will further their focus or dilute it.
Which means you shouldn’t create these lists once and then put them in a drawer. These two lists are your map for each day. Review them each morning, along with your calendar, and ask: What’s the plan for today? Where will I spend my time? How will it further my focus? How might I get distracted? Then find the courage to follow through, make choices, and maybe disappoint a few people.
After the CEO busted me in the elevator, he told me about the meeting he had just come from. It was a gathering of all the finalists, of which he was one, for the title of Entrepreneur of the Year. This was an important meeting for him—as it was for everyone who aspired to the title (the judges were all in attendance)—and before he entered, he had made two explicit decisions: (1) to focus on the meeting itself; and (2) not to check his BlackBerry.
What amazed him was that he was the only one not glued to a mobile device. Were all the other CEOs not interested in the title? Were their businesses so dependent on them that they couldn’t be away for one hour? Is either of those messages a smart thing to communicate to the judges?
There was only one thing that was most important in that hour and there was only one CEO whose behavior reflected that importance, who knew where to focus and what to ignore. Whether or not he wins the title, he’s already winning the game.
To get the right things done, choosing what to ignore is as important as choosing where to focus.
