Effectiveness Is All About Managing Your Time, Energy, and Attention
I bet you think you’d be able to do a lot more if you had more time. If so, you’re probably wrong. Having more time is only a piece of the puzzle.
It’s not so much just the quantity of time that we should consider, but the quality of time, too.
This is largely the foundation of the idea ofheatmapping your productivity and the engagement threshold. In each case, time is only one factor – with energy and attention being the others.
The fact that time is only one of three factors doesn’t discount the importance of time, for having an abundance of creative energy or being especially engaged doesn’t help much if you don’t have enough time to do anything with them. Manifesting change in the world takes time, but that’s not all it takes.
The reason why thinking in terms of time, energy, and attention is important is that many of us operate as if more time equals more capacity, when in reality it often doesn’t . Anyone who’s sat at their desk at the end of the day in that awkward middleground where they’re neither working nor playing understands this. Yet the overriding tendency is to sit there nonetheless because the operating assumption is that more time working equals more work done, evidence to the contrary be damned.
We like to think in terms of time because it’s a lot easier than to try to evaluate the trinity of time, energy, and attention – our TEA – especially since time is objectively measurable. If we’re in a scenario where others are directly or indirectly evaluating our output, a dutifully completed time card is a safe fallback because, as we’ve already observed, more time at work equals more work done. And, in fairness, it’s hard to gauge someone else’s energy and attention from the outside when you’re in a large organization, so the time card gives us something to go by.
Many of us creatives don’t work in those environments, though, but we’ve done an excellent job of keeping the model. This is quite unfortunate, because creative effectiveness is all about harnessing our TEA . We might only have two hours per day where we have the concentrated TEA that we need to do some creative heavy lifting, and if we don’t use that TEA wisely, no amount of any single component of the triad is going to help us work at that same level.
This Isn’t New, But We Need to Be Reminded About It A Lot
What I’m saying here isn’t anything new either in my own thinking or in that of others. For my own part, I’ve written about some of these ideas directly in a General Theory of Productivity a few years ago and indirectly in just about every post I’ve written on productivity. One way to understand a lot of what’s going on in Getting Things Done is to see that David Allen is giving us a process to get things out of our heads, which increases the amount of attention and energy we have available to us. Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz address energy and attention more directly in The Power of Full Engagement. Stephen Covey’s 7 Habitsframework is generally about using our TEA proactively rather than reactively. The huge body of work on time management and efficiency tends to focus on creating processes and systems that increase available time by decreasing the time seepage that often happens with our work. And so on.
Instead of thinking just about how you’re using your time, think about how you’re using your time, energy, and attention . I’ll wrap this up with some questions for you to ponder:
On gaining time : What are you doing that you could either stop doing or do more efficiently so that there’s less time seepage?
On using time : What would you do with any additional time that you gain? Is the juice worth the squeeze?
On gaining energy : What could you do to increase your available physical, emotional, social, mental, and physical energy?
On losing energy : What are the sources of energy drain in your life? Is there something you can do to address those sources? It’ll probably take more energy to deal with the cause than the symptom, but continually applying band-aids has a cost, too.
On gaining attention : What really engages you? What are naturally drawn to do?
On losing attention (being distracted) : What’s distracting you or causing you to continually shift focus? Is there a way to alter your environment so you’re less prone to be distracted by them?
效率，就在于管理好你的時間、精力和注意力
“要是我有更多時間的話，我一定可以完成更多的事情?！?，我敢打賭你一定持有過這樣的想法。但是，你錯了。是否擁有更多時間只是問題的一方面而已。
我們不僅要考慮時間的總量，還要考慮時間的質(zhì)量。
這主要就是提升你的效率與恒心指數(shù)這一概念的基本組成部分。在每種情況下，除了時間這一因素之外，還有精力與注意力需要你考慮進去。（恒心指數(shù)，衡量你持之以恒做一件事的程度的名詞---譯注）
影響效率的因素雖有三個，但也不意味著時間是一個不重要的因素。因為要是你沒有充足的時間去做一件事的話，你就算擁有更多的精力和更高的專注力也無濟于事。所有變化都是需要時間的，但時間也不是唯一的一個因素。
之所以把時間、精力與注意力都視為同等重要的因素，是因為人們錯誤地把“工作時間越多”等同于“工作產(chǎn)能越大”。實際情況并不如此。要是一個人既不工作又不玩樂地度過一天，那么他就能真切地明白這點。人們普遍的觀點就是認為投入進工作的時間越多也就意味能夠完成更多的工作量，與此相反的觀點則被他們所嗤之以鼻。
為什么我們僅考慮到了時間管理
之所以這樣是因為這樣相對而言要容易些，如果我們同時對時間、精力、注意力這三者進行評估的話，難度會更大---而且，只有時間這一項是可以被客觀評估的。不論是直接還是間接地評估一個人的工作產(chǎn)量，一張忠實的時間卡就是種較妥當?shù)挠^測方法，因為大家都是普遍認可“工作時間越多，工作產(chǎn)量也就越大”這種觀點。另外，在一個大型的組織里對每個人的精力和注意力作評估是件根本就無法辦到的事，所以，時間卡就是一種比較公平的評估手段。
雖然許多創(chuàng)造性的人才并不在這樣的環(huán)境中工作，但他們確實以自己的出色表現(xiàn)作了好榜樣，他讓我們目標效率不僅僅與時間管理有關(guān)，還與精力、注意力密切相關(guān)?；蛟S我們每天僅僅有兩個小時的時間處于高效狀態(tài)，但是，如果我們沒有明智地協(xié)調(diào)使用我們的時間、精力和注意力的話，我們就無論無何也無法達到高效工作的狀態(tài)。
這并不是什么新鮮的概念，但我們也要時常提醒自己運用這種理念
本文所將的并不是什么新鮮的內(nèi)容，早在幾年前我就在《效率概論》一文中表達了其中的一些想法。要想理解戴維·艾倫在《搞定》一書書中所傳達的理念的一個方法，就是要看到他向我們展示了一條將頭腦中的想法變成現(xiàn)實的過程，這一過程讓我們的精力與專注力都有了很大的提升。 吉姆·洛爾和托尼·施瓦茨在《全力以赴:高效能人士的精力管理手冊》一書中對精力與專注力作了非常清晰的闡述。史蒂芬·科維所著的《高效能人士的七個習慣》 的基本概念就是在講我們要主動地而非被動地使用我們的時間、精力與注意力。花費在時間管理與效率提升上的大塊時間有助于我們忘我地投入到創(chuàng)造性的工作體系中去，通過這種方法就可以削減時常發(fā)生在我們身上的低效工作時間的總量。
與其把目光局限在時間的使用方式上，還不如地去思考自己是如何使用自己的時間、精力與注意力的。下面就是我專門為你所準備的幾個問題，好好思考下吧：
關(guān)于獲取時間: 為了節(jié)約寶貴的時間，你現(xiàn)在所做的事情中又哪些事情可以停止去的呢？還有哪些事情可以更高效地完成的呢？
關(guān)于精力消耗: 哪些事情讓你疲憊不堪呢？你可以做哪些事來減少這類情況的發(fā)生呢？尋找原因比起應(yīng)對它所引起的癥狀而言，很有可能會花費你更多的精力。不過這也沒什么，無論做什么事都是要付出代價的。
