When there’s 101 different things vying for our attention – paths to follow, actions to take, new approaches to explore and branches to shake – how do we pick between them?
It’s tempting to brute-force it. To flex the full extent of our abilities and crush the challenge placed before us:
Finding the perfect choice, making it, and seeing it through to the end.
But that’s no solution. It’s not sustainable, and it certainly doesn’t scale… Because there’s a limit to the amount of competing thoughts we can entertain at once.
Rather than trying to find the perfect choice, the antidote to overwhelm lies in focus. Eliminating the trivial many & spending our limited time/energy/resources on dealing with the small number of things which make a difference.
Faced with more entry points than we can count, there’s one question we can come back to in order to find our way forward:
What one thing can I do that will make everything else easier – or unnecessary?
Few things matter in the grand scheme.
The only thing which moves the needle is progress (in whatever domain that equipment is designed to measure).
Everything else is clutter.
Activity and forward movement are not the same thing.
The sooner we realise that – and the sooner we see how distraction is the bottleneck, not our ability to effortlessly choose from an unlimited range of responses – the faster we free ourselves to make progress towards the things that matter.