Attention focus
Where your attention is directed, there will generally be results. But if your attention is spread among too many projects, hobbies, and interests, you will not have proper results because you lack focus.
Focus attracts attention to the necessary object or background, sets the context for discussions at meetings. If during a meeting you were supposed to discuss ideas for a new product, but ended up spending most of the time discussing trivial matters, dedicating only 10 minutes to new ideas, it means that focus was lost during the meeting. This often happens when meeting participants did not have a pre-agreed agenda, the agenda was not displayed on a common screen, and attention was not held on it.
Focus also impacts decision-making. For example, marketers often create promotional materials in a way to influence your purchase decision emotionally. Moreover, a specific focus, like in personal or company strategy, imposes constraints on how opportunities will be selected for implementation later on.
In the modern world, people often lack focus and have a scattered attention. They try to take on multiple projects and problems at once, logically cannot cope with them (resources are not limitless! Choices will have to be made!) and start blaming themselves for not managing. Even though in reality, managing them all was physically impossible with the available resources. If you see a businessman with 5+ businesses or "projects", they most likely lack focus. Instead of selecting the business that is most interesting and profitable and growing it, they try to start too many businesses in different fields at once. As a result, the businessman's full attention of 100% is divided not onto one business, but onto 5 – meaning, each gets only 20% attention. This hinders many entrepreneurs from growing successfully. Employees sometimes try to take on more projects to earn approval from management. However, if an employee has 5-10+ projects per month, their attention will be thinly spread over all of them, similar to spreading butter over bread – resulting in nothing being done for the least important project, and not enough done for the most important ones. And then the employee receives reprimand instead of encouragement!
Having one key focus, like on one project, allows it to progress rapidly and decisions to be made faster. However, there is also a downside: setting a focus can be used to manipulate decisions and opinions.
For example, imagine someone reading the news: "In the lists of the wealthiest taxpayers of Florence in the 15th and 21st centuries, almost 900 surnames coincide?" Especially if the news is accompanied by speculations like "everything is bought?" Probably, the reader may start to think that working hard is useless, they will never become wealthy. However, if the reader looks into the original research, they would find that the 15th century list contained 10 thousand surnames. 900 surnames (actually more than 800) out of 10 thousand is 9%. Most families disappeared or lost their wealth.
Or another example: in 2016, a report was published on the causes of deaths in the US, where they compared:
- Real causes of American deaths based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (a federal agency of the US Department of Health);
- Google search trends on disease causes;
- Mentions of causes of deaths in the New York Times and The Guardian.
It turned out that the real number one killer is cardiovascular diseases (30.2% of deaths), followed by cancer (29.5%). However, in the media, terrorism (33%-36%) and murder (22-23%) were most frequently mentioned as causes of American deaths. In the list of actual causes of death, these reasons were at the bottom (murder 0.9%, terrorism less than 0.01%). The media barely covered cardiovascular diseases, creating an alternative reality where there seemed to be no problem with them!
To avoid falling for manipulations related to focus, it is worth asking yourself: "Have all the objects critical for understanding the situation been identified? Are the options for actions/operations with them clear? Has anything been missed?"