Too many goals and too little time? How to focus your attention
MARIELLE SEGARRA, HOST:
You're listening to LIFE KIT...
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SEGARRA: ...From NPR.
Hey, everybody. It's Marielle. Lately, I've been loving the idea of becoming a Renaissance woman - you know, a Jill-of-all-trades, the gal who can do it all - 'cause I have a lot of interests. I like to read fantasy and adventure novels, play around with fashion and colorful makeup. I have many spiritual pursuits. I just took a woodworking class, went roller skating and loved it. I enjoy rock climbing and yoga and music. I'm planning to learn the drums, and I also have a ukulele sitting in my closet, waiting for me to pick it up. I'd love to get back into tap dancing. Oh, there's sewing, too. Got a sewing machine for Christmas, and I just turned it on this week. OK - I can see how my plate might be a little too full.
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SEGARRA: Truth is, we can only spread our attention so thin.
OLIVER BURKEMAN: When you get to the end of your life, the sum total of all the things you paid attention to will have been your life. If there are some friendships there that you never actually paid any attention to - well, you didn't really have those friendships, right? I mean, if there was an interest that you had that you never actually spent any attention pursuing - well, you didn't really have that interest. So it really matters what we're paying attention to because it just is - it just adds up to a life.
SEGARRA: This is Oliver Burkeman. He's the author of "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals." The book is about how to manage the limited time we have on Earth, which, if you live to 80, comes out to about 4,000 weeks.
BURKEMAN: And even if you're incredibly lucky in terms of your lifespan, it's still going to be a very hard limit. And this has lots of ramifications for how we think about using our daily time that I think we don't pay enough attention to, really.
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SEGARRA: On this episode of LIFE KIT, how to focus on the things you're actually excited about and the activities and pursuits that align with your values. This will likely mean putting some things on the shelf for now, and clawing back your attention from social media and all the bright and shiny things that happen inside your phone. Oliver and other LIFE KIT experts are going to share tips on how we can be intentional about our attention.
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SEGARRA: I think most of us feel scattered a lot of the time. We have our jobs. We have to feed ourselves. We need to clean our apartments or houses, take care of our kids or family members, catch up with friends, work on creative projects. Is it any wonder we feel like we're constantly failing at everything on our to-do list? And, yeah, there are some basic needs that we have to meet. But beyond those, takeaway one is to pick one main goal at a time and lock in. So maybe you want to finish writing a book or actually learn how to use that sewing machine. If you're having trouble choosing from your list of interests, Kareemah Batts has some advice for you. She's a rock climber who founded the Adaptive Climbing Group, a climbing program for people with disabilities.
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SEGARRA: Rock climbing was not on her radar until she went through a difficult transition in her life. She had undergone treatment for cancer that required her leg below the knee to be amputated, and she was trying to accept those changes. Part of that journey meant finding new ways of moving and feeling good in her body.
KAREEMAH BATTS: And I purposely chose the rock climbing because I had literally never done it before.
SEGARRA: So Kareemah's advice for picking a hobby, interest or a new project is to start with a wide lens.
BATTS: Pick three things that seem interesting, and then pick two things that you think you would never like.
SEGARRA: You might look for ideas online, ask your friends what sort of activities they've liked doing recently, or find a list of creative workshops in your area. You can try out a one-time class to gauge how interested you actually are in something. And then, as you're narrowing it down, consider your values at this moment, your needs and what it feels like is lacking in your life. You might also cross some things off for logistical reasons, right? The costs, the commuting distance, the amount of time you'd need to commit.
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SEGARRA: Whatever you land on, get ready to devote regular attention to this pursuit. And that means...
BURKEMAN: Choosing in advance what to fail at. I think that is a lovely idea that I got originally from the author Jon Acuff.
SEGARRA: Accept right now that something in your life is probably going to slip through the cracks as you pursue this goal or interest. If you're spending a ton of time doing activities that'll help you meet new people, for instance, you're not going to be at home as much. You might have to be OK with a messy house or with eating out more. Or, if you're focused on tap dancing, you might not also have time for rock climbing every week. Better to decide now what you do want to fail at than discover, sometime down the road, that you didn't do anything because you were trying to do it all.
BURKEMAN: When you realize that, in fact, you are going to have to fail at something, you decide it in advance. It's a lot more pleasant because, you know, you don't put the effort in in the first place. You don't have to then keep beating yourself up for not doing something that humans can't do.
SEGARRA: Concentrating on one goal at a time means you'll probably finish it more quickly. And when you do pour into your passion, it can give back to you as much as you've given to it. When Kareemah started climbing, she got her independence back, and she found a new community.
BATTS: You know, no one's doing it for you. You know, no one's giving you an extra help. In a way, it's all you. And I think, especially as a person with a disability, that feeling I was struggling with, which I find a lot of people with disabilities tend to struggle with, is about when you have a lot of able-bodied people around you. You know, are you doing it yourself? You know, who's helping you? That sense of independence is super important to us and being self-sufficient. And I feel like climbing does that but at the same time allows to bring people together.
SEGARRA: OK, I want to tell you about someone else's goal now. Her name is Leah Shafer (ph), and she's been working on a novel about vampires.
LEAH SHAFER: And she goes to his Hill Country home. And they sort of trade blood for a safe place for a little while. And then some other vampires.
SEGARRA: A few years ago, Leah had managed to write one draft of this book. But in the past year?
SHAFER: I've rewritten this three times, I think, maybe 3 1/2. And I wrote two more books, terrible books, but each better than the last.
SEGARRA: Her progress took off when she met Jamie (ph), her accountability partner. He's an author, too, and they met online.
SHAFER: I was on TikTok. And just some random dude was like, does anybody want to be accountability buddies with me? And I was like, I don't even know what that is, but sure, I'll try it. And then we met I think that same week on Zoom. And we have been meeting every week, every Friday, at 9 o'clock for over a year now.
SEGARRA: He tells her his goals for the week and she tells him hers. Here's an example from the week we interviewed her.
SHAFER: When we meet on Friday, I'm supposed to have gone through my first 10 chapters in my novel for revisions and recorded five TikToks (laughter). And he's doing - you know, he'll do some marketing, book marketing, because he's got some books out. He'll do some writing goals. And sometimes we have...
SEGARRA: Leah has done more work on this novel in the past year than ever before.
SHAFER: I definitely don't think I would've gotten the work done this last year if I hadn't had Jamie as my buddy and met every week. I would sit there in our Zoom meetings and think, I should - quote-unquote "should" - be able to do this alone. But there is some kind of - like, there's some magic in it. Like, I highly recommend it.
SEGARRA: So our Takeaway 2 is to find focus in community.
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SEGARRA: Humans are social animals.
AYELET FISHBACH: People have been working in groups from the beginning of times. We do things with others. And when others are not around, they are in our mind.
SEGARRA: Ayelet Fishbach is a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. One finding from her research is that in the presence of other people, our actions feel more meaningful to us. And that's true even if they're strangers.
FISHBACH: We had people in China playing badminton as part of some event. And when there were more people in the audience, they felt that they either contributed more to the win or contributed more to the loss, but what they did matter.
SEGARRA: If you're struggling to make the time for one of your goals or to stick to it, to keep practicing, it could help to team up with a person or a group of people willing to carve out space and focus together. The classic example of this is a running buddy or a running group, but there's so many other versions of this, too - book club, drummers circle. I mean, there's a group in Brooklyn that meets once a month to carve wooden spoons. I went to their last meetup. It was great. What I'm saying is you can find your people.
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SEGARRA: Our next takeaway, Takeaway 3, is to tap into the power of routine. Cynthia Pong is the founder and CEO of Embrace Change, a career coaching firm focused on women of color. She says another way to keep moving toward our goals is to create defaults in our lives.
CYNTHIA PONG: Most of us grew up through some sort of school system where there's a lot of structure, and you have to do things on a certain timeline within this container, turn things in. Someone else is grading. Like, there's that entire dynamic, and so it becomes really ingrained.
SEGARRA: Think about the routines you have that make goals easier for you. Having healthy teeth likely doesn't need to be a goal if you brush your teeth and floss regularly. Or if you get in the routine of biking to work, you'll advance in your fitness goals without needing to spend extra brain power thinking about the how.
PONG: We've got a thousand reasons why we shouldn't do the thing. But if it's, like, a standing situation and you just get into that routine, it will just become reflexive.
SEGARRA: And reflexive is the operative word here. Routines help take some of the mental load off of us by making our behaviors automatic.
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SEGARRA: So we've been talking about strategies to hold ourselves accountable to a goal. Another way to come at this, Takeaway 4, is to improve your memory. You likely won't make a lot of progress in your chosen skill or interest if your memory is scattered across a bunch of different things and you're not remembering what you learned the last time you practiced this skill. Luckily, you can improve your memory. To understand how we do that, we're going to walk you through how a memory gets made. And you're going to hear from Lisa Genova, a neuroscientist and author of the book "Remember: The Science Of Memory And The Art Of Forgetting."
LISA GENOVA: First your brain takes in all the sights, the sounds, the smells, the taste, the meaning, the emotion, the language of what you perceived and paid attention to and translates all of that into neurological language.
SEGARRA: Then your brain weaves all of that information together. The important part here is that memories are multisensory. And the more senses involved in a memory, the stronger it becomes. Also, at a future date, if you activate your senses in the same way, the other details of a memory can come flooding back. This is something we can use to our advantage. Let's say you're trying to learn Spanish or get good at the tuba, and you're sitting down to practice. Form a habit where you light a candle or spray a certain essential oil into the air or put a heating pad in your lap, something that stimulates your senses. And then the next time you go to practice, do the same thing.
GENOVA: So if I'm in the same physiological, emotional state, if I have the same kind of cues - oh, there was this scent, there was this sound. If I was listening to Dua Lipa and then, like, if I have a chance to, like, listen to Dua Lipa while I take the test, it might help me remember those vocabulary words.
SEGARRA: OK, Takeaway 5 is to eliminate distractions, or at least the ones that aren't nourishing you.
BURKEMAN: If you're paying attention to things that on some level you don't want to be paying attention to, you're just giving away the only precious thing you have - right? - which is the time of your life.
SEGARRA: I know Oliver is right, but it's really hard to resist the pull of things like social media. I don't have accounts on most social media platforms. I do have a private Instagram, but I don't even keep the app on my phone. I only look at it on the browser. Even then, you know, one second, I'm watching a video my friend sent, and 20 minutes later, I'm down a rabbit hole, looking at another video about the new Purple Wiggle and how hot he is.
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SEGARRA: He really is, though. That hole I get sucked into - that we all get sucked into - not only distracts me from my goals, but it leaves me feeling stressed and guilty.
JOSE BRIONES: This happened to me when I had around 12 to 13 hours of connected devices and smart devices use. I felt stressed. I felt anxious in a way that I hadn't, and that was difficult.
SEGARRA: Jose Briones is the author of the book "Low Tech Life: A Guide To Mindful Digital Minimalism." Right after college, Jose found that his life had been overtaken by screens, and he was spending all of his time passively. He decided to do something drastic. He traded in his smartphone for a boring phone - you know, a basic phone without a ton of apps or social media.
BRIONES: So what I have done since I switched to a more basic phone is I go for walks every two to three hours. I have a dog that is quite active, and he helps me in this. So I go on a walk with my dog in the neighborhood, and I just take that time to recompose, think about what's just happening in my life and processing all of the different aspects of it.
SEGARRA: The time that Jose would've spent on his phone is still unstructured alone time. That hasn't changed. He's just more mindful during it. By the way, the endgame with cutting out distractions isn't to just put all that time towards work. It's to be intentional about where your time goes so your rest feels more like rest and so you're rejuvenated and excited for the time you are working towards something. You might slowly find yourself reclaiming interests that you've abandoned over the years.
BRIONES: I've been able to recover a lot of those habits that I used to have in university - reading books, just taking time, better sleep, exercising, walking, just going out and thinking about my day and having better relationships. And I was able to, at the same time, start a hobby to help people find what's the best path for them. So I guess I gained a lot of skills and a lot of different things during this time period that have made my life more satisfying.
SEGARRA: That brings me to one final point. The quest for peak performance and peak focus can, if we're not careful, block us from experiencing life.
STUART BROWN: It's easy to lose a sense of an experience, which is in itself wondrous, by demanding that the experience produce outcome.
SEGARRA: That's Dr. Stuart Brown. He's a psychiatrist and founder of the National Institute for Play. And he says when you're doing something simply for the end result, you lose joy in the process. Hyperfocusing on productivity can also get in the way of us finding new activities that we might love. So while you're letting yourself focus on one main goal, also allow yourself time to try new things and be bad at them or to just sit in silence. The next big project can wait. Remember; you can't do it all, not in this lifetime. But Oliver says there's beauty in that because in accepting our limitations, we can really start to make the most of our time.
BURKEMAN: I think there's a lot of very meaningful projects and activities, both in personal life and in work, in activism, in all sorts of domains, where it's very useful to think, what if I judged the value of this task - not by whether I'm going to see the world saved from climate chaos, or whether my parenting ended up creating wonderfully successful human beings, or whether this organization finally manages to bring justice to this corner of the world or something like that - but just see it as valuable, as a part of a very long chain that has - you know, of people who've been there centuries before you and of people who will be there centuries after you? And just sort of focus on what you can do in the little stretch of time that you have.
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SEGARRA: All right. It's time for a recap. Takeaway 1 is to focus on one goal at a time and choose the things you're willing to fail at.
Takeaway 2 - find a community or a buddy to help keep you accountable.
Takeaway 3 - build routines so you have more energy to focus on the things you're excited about.
Takeaway 4 - improve your memory with sensory cues like scents and sounds.
Takeaway 5 - eliminate the distractions that are not nourishing you.
And then before you move on to your next pursuit, take a break. Be aimless. Do some things just because you feel like it. They might lead you to another activity that you're going to love.
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SEGARRA: For more LIFE KIT, check out our other episodes. We've got one on how to move more and another on how to boost your mood. You can find those at npr.org/lifekit. And if you love LIFE KIT and want even more, subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org/lifekitnewsletter. Also, we love hearing from you. So if you have episode ideas or feedback you want to share, email us at lifekit@npr.org.
This episode of LIFE KIT was produced by Margaret Cirino. Our visuals editor is Beck Harlan, and our digital editor is Malaka Gharib. Meghan Keane is our supervising editor, and Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andee Tagle, Clare Marie Schneider, Sam Yellowhorse Kesler and Sylvie Douglis. Engineering support comes from Patrick Murray. I'm Marielle Segarra. Thanks for listening.
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