Your focus determines your reality. —Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Without selective interest, experience is utter chaos. —William James

such busyness is just an active form of laziness when it doesn’t lead to actually accomplishing anything.

Directing your attention toward the most important object of your choosing—and then sustaining that attention—is the most consequential decision we will make throughout the day. We are what we pay attention to.

This is the problem with managing your attention on autopilot mode. The most urgent and stimulating things in your environment are rarely the most significant.

While falling into autopilot mode can help us keep up the pace of work and life, attention is our most limited and constrained resource. The more we can manage our attention with intention, the more focused, productive, and creative we become.

In other words, roughly how much of your time do you spend deliberately and with intention, deciding in advance what you want to do and when you’ll do it?

After consuming one of those products, will you be happy with how you invested your time and attention? Just as you are what you eat, you are what you pay attention to.

When we invest our limited attention intelligently and deliberately, we focus more deeply and think more clearly. This is an essential skill in today’s world, when we are so often in distracting environments doing brain-heavy knowledge work.