Managing our Attention in the Digital Age
Posted on April 24, 2024 by Dave Todaro, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.
Does an ancient, familiar prayer give hints to how we can solve the problem of sorting out which information deserves our time, attention, energy?
Cellphones. Teams, Slack, Google Workspace. Cable news networks. Netflix, Amazon Prime. YouTube, TikTok, Meta and that thing formerly known as Twitter. The Middle East, Ukraine, Taiwan. Your Inbox. Is my favorite team’s quarterback healed up enough to play this week? And that siren that seems to be racing past my office, what’s that about? And that smell… the roast!
So much information screams for so much of our attention every single day. Some of it is like junk food, and some helps us grow. One person’s info junk food is another person’s essential business intel.
Maybe you know someone with an insatiable appetite to stay as current and “in the know” as possible on a person, place or thing that you can’t fathom the importance of. You see this person spending lots of time and energy pursuing, processing, reacting to this information. Is it good or bad for them?
When does the truth content of that old maxim “Information is power” cross the line into the kind of “information overload” that distracts, robbing us of power and potential? Every person must answer this for her or himself because every person is free to determine what is truly important to them. Often though, we think we are too busy to make the time for what that determination really requires:
- the patience to work through the deeper questions of meaning and purpose
- the thoughtfulness that leads us to set and prioritize goals that express our purpose; and
- the discipline to structure our lives so that we’re spending enough time on the actions needed to achieve those goals.
One role of a coach is to give people a safe, confidential, non-judgmental and supportive space to work through all of this. It can apply to any of the roles a person might play: as a parent, a business leader, a young professional seeking to build a successful career, a person in a career or personal transition.
You may be familiar with the “Serenity Prayer:”
God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change,
The courage to change the things we can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
A good coach can help a person to truly weave the ideas expressed by this prayer into the way they handle all the information that comes flying their way in the digital age. Yes, the prayer can seem trite if it’s read quickly as one rushes on to the next piece of information that calls for attention. Or we can choose to think more deeply about what the words really mean. And then, the “Serenity Prayer” just might become powerful.
