Week 22.47 Pay Attention

Why and where we read has changed, and that has changed us. I was once an avid reader of long-form, printed materials. I now spend hours weekly reading through emails, presentations, CVs, proposals, websites, blogs, texts, slacks, WhatsApp groups, and transcripts, to name many. Most of this is not reading that I want to do but rather reading that I have to do to stay up on what is happening at work and in life. And I am barely staying up on what is happening.?What is going on here is that all of this “reading” is grabbing our attention from us. We have all heard it said that time is our most precious resource, and attention is the cream of time. We should consider how we read, why we read, and how we can get more from the particular kind of reading that allows us to expand our minds and ourselves when we actually have the attention to contemplate what we are reading.

There are 3 essential ways we read: skimming, reading for content, and deep reading. These ideas come from a great episode of the Ezra Klein podcast with Maryanne Wolf, author of Reader Come Home: A Reading Brain in a Digital World. Skimming is the quick way we move through vast amounts of material, decoding what we need from what we can ignore. Previously we might have used skimming occasionally when reading a newspaper. Today a great deal of time is spent skimming digital articles, emails, texts, tweets, and perhaps even newsletters! The second essential way we read, reading for information, is more of a commitment. It is when we spend time with the written word to understand what it says, perhaps to think about how to respond. Sometimes the difference between skimming and reading for content is slim, such as a quick response to a text message or, more significantly a thoughtful reply to an email.

What I yearn to explore is more deep reading, to use what Wolf refers to as "full circuitry — the full circuitry which includes using your background knowledge to infer, to deduce the truth value, to feel what that author is feeling in a work of fiction, to understand a completely different perspective." It is what Proust referred to as "the heart of reading as the place where we go beyond the wisdom of the author to discover our own." Part of Wolf's genius is how she pairs science and literature. Brain scans show that deep reading is valuable because it engages our mind in contemplation, expands the most complex of our neural circuits, makes new connections, and leads to creativity and unique thoughts!

Think of it this way: over the past 6,000 years, we have gone from verbal storytelling to the written word to digital communications. According to Wolf, our brains were never designed for reading; we evolved by the remarkable ability of our brains to adapt to our needs, and therefore reading is our most evolved brain function. When skimming text, we use the most primitive forms of our reading ability, like scanning early symbols. When we read for information, we use our brains more fully but do not push them beyond capacity. When we engage in deep reading, we uncover our potential, expand our capacity, and perhaps even find new thoughts. Productivity is good, but it will neither solve big problems nor inspire grand goals. For that, we need quality attention and insight to allow our minds to push beyond what we read and add new thoughts to create new ideas.

Where we choose to focus our attention determines the outcome. And too much skimming, video watching, and jumping from email to email depletes our attention span and makes us yearn for more thoughtful ways to engage with our world. Reading for information is good; reading for contemplation is where the gold is. Deep reading helps us to be more creative, extend our empathy, and expand our capacity. We need to be richer, deeper, more empathetic thinkers in life and leadership. To solve the problems we face, individually and collectively, we will need capacious thinking, inclusive understanding, and expansive feeling. These are the qualities that build a relationship-first world. Join me as I rebuild my deep reading ability one page at a time for 15 mins a day, so that next year, we will have attention, insight, and empathy to share.

Track Your Time for 30 Days. What You Learn Might Surprise You by Dorie Clark

Inspired by a colleague, the time management expert Laura Vanderkam, I decided to spend the month of February tracking exactly how I spent my time, down to half-hour increments. It wasn’t high tech — I used an Excel spreadsheet — but even the process of remembering to write things down was arduous. After all, we’re used to living our lives, not recording them. But the insights I gained over the course of a month were extremely useful. If you can manage to keep it up, the knowledge gleaned from time tracking can be invaluable. Understanding where you can successfully multitask, essentially giving yourself more hours in the day, can transform your productivity. And recognizing which activities are stressful enables you to make smarter decisions about how to delegate or reshuffle your workflow, so you can optimize for the tasks that suit you best. Without data, it’s easy to paint an erroneous picture of how we spend our time, whether it’s inadvertently exaggerating the number of hours we work or assuming we’re wasting more time than we really do. My month of time tracking revealed useful insights that have enabled me to become more productive — and if you make an effort to evaluate your schedule, it may highlight ways you can optimize moving forward as well.

A not-so-secret fact about me - I love to laugh . by Jacquelyn Lane

For a long time, I thought that laughing in the workplace was “unprofessional.” I now realize that serious does not equal professional. Today, I’m proud to be doing work that’s deeply aligned with my purpose, building a company I love, and working with my heroes and best friends. And guess what? I laugh - and I mean belly laugh - at work every day. There’s such joy in being my fullest self. I was recently told by a colleague that as a young blonde woman who smiles and laughs a lot I wouldn’t be taken seriously. Do you know how I responded? I laughed.

How to Hold Onto Valuable Employees by Ruth Gotian, Ed.D., M.S.

Mentoring has become a hot topic lately, and it is no surprise. Research shows that mentoring dramatically impacts employees’ professional ascension while simultaneously taming their potential for burnout. It also undoubtedly benefits the mentor, who learns just as much from the mentee. What people are not openly discussing is how much mentoring helps the organization. You can explore whether the mentor is trying to recreate a younger version of themselves (a big no-no in mentoring) or putting wings on their mentee so they can soar in their chosen career. Being a mentor is not a label one gives themselves. It is an honor earned through dedication and encouragement. You are not a mentor until your mentee calls you one. True mentors understand that when their mentees succeed, they succeed (just ask Dr. Robert Lefkowitz, who shared the Nobel Prize with his mentee, Dr. Brian Kobilka). In a volatile job market, where holding on to the best employees is paramount, utilizing behavioral questions to find the best mentors is a strategy worth trying.

Remember - Design the Long Life You Love by Ayse (Eye-Shay) Birsel releases on December 6! Pre-order here

With love, gratitude and wonder, Scott