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?

Simplifying our attentional space lets us maintain enough room to work and live intentionally throughout the day. This lets us spend more time on what’s important and meaningful in the moment.

For now, though, when you do notice your focus fading, step back from this book for a few minutes to do something relatively mindless.

PUT YOUR PHONE OUT OF SIGHT When your mind is even slightly resisting a task, it will look for more novel things to focus on. Our smartphones are a great example—they provide an endless stream of bite-sized, delicious information for our brains to consume.

Without selective interest, experience is utter chaos. —William James Your focus determines your reality. —Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace

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.

Studies show we can work for an average of just forty seconds in front of a computer before we’re either distracted or interrupted. (Needless to say, we do our best work when we attend to a task for a lot longer than forty seconds.)

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

First, there’s a finite limit to how many things we can focus on.