The need to pay attention to how we pay attention is greater than ever it was.

The prioritisation methods I teach gets some very valuable back up from Daniel Levitin, a prominent neuroscientist.
This need to pay attention to how we pay attention is the Launchpad for his new book, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload.

He stresses how all the most successful people he has researched from just about every walk of life have a key essential skill …. the ability to prioritise well under pressure.

Especially interesting are his findings that the decision making neurons in the brain use up the same amount of fuel (glucose) when making trivial decisions as when making important ones.
And that those people who firstly ‘major in the minors’ make worse decisions later when tackling more important ones, he calls it decision-fatigue.

So, 3 thoughts for now:

  1. If we have only a limited amount of fuel available it is folly to waste it on trivia!
  2. Procrastination not only wastes time, it also sucks the fuel from our brains
  3. Having a robust Prioritised workload framework view of our critical Tasks helps us maintain focus by minimising distractions. Scrolling up and down rammed inboxes, scanning unstructured To-Do lists and using too many information silos makes decision making more difficult than it needs to be.