Summer Attention

As I write this, I can hear my son’s guitar in the next room. I’m checking LinkedIn. Thinking about the holiday. Remembering emails I haven’t answered, actions I haven’t done.

Nothing unusual.

And that’s precisely the problem.

Our attention has become our most valuable resource, yet we spend much of the day fragmenting it.

Author Cal Newport argues that deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the moment it is becoming most valuable. I suspect the same is true of deep conversations, deep thinking and deep rest.

For leaders, the consequences are subtle but profound.

When attention is constantly interrupted, we make shallower decisions. We solve today’s problem instead of tomorrow’s. We hear people’s words but miss what they really mean. We remain busy but struggle to point to the outcomes that genuinely mattered.

The issue isn’t effort.

It’s conditions.

At To Focus, we often say that healthy outcomes grow from healthy conditions. Attention is one of those conditions. Just as poor soil produces weaker crops, fragmented attention produces fragmented thinking.

Perhaps that is what a holiday is really for.

Not simply escaping work, but rebuilding the conditions that good work depends upon.

I’m setting myself three small experiments this summer.

1) Read one book slowly.

Mine is Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native.

2) Take walks without podcasts or headphones, practising what Pauline Oliveros called “deep listening” - paying attention to the world before rushing to interpret it.

3) Have one conversation each day where I give someone my complete attention. No phone. No agenda. No rehearsing my reply.

None of these will appear on a spreadsheet.

Yet each one strengthens the quality of the thinking that eventually does.

When I look back on family holidays, I rarely remember how much we fitted in. I remember the conversations. The unexpected insights. The moments when everyone stopped rushing long enough to notice one another.

As autumn approaches, most organisations will focus on plans, projects and targets.

Before adding more, it may be worth asking a simpler question.

What conditions will help our people think well enough to achieve them?

Have a restorative summer.

I hope you return not simply rested, but with your capacity for attention renewed.

Warm regards,

Mark