Pay attention to what you are paying attention to.

– John Green

This exercise is insightful in two days.

One, it surfaces topics that we are actually interested in that our rational “I-should-be” version may often sideline. Like maybe that promotion we have been singularly focused on is not aligned with our real day-to-day interests.

Two, this shines a spotlight on the time we spend on distractions that we consider small. At the start of the pandemic, I began to notice how a quick one-minute of Facebook surfing turned into an hour in the blink of an eye. Until I paid attention, I had deluded myself convincingly that I was spending no more than 1 hour online when in reality it was multiple blocks of 1 hour throughout the day. This got me to take a series of conscious steps to curb my social media usage.

Too often we let life happen to us. Paying attention puts the steering wheel back in our hand. Helps us figure out what we really want to do with our lives.