Graham Allcott

managing your stress and eliminating distractions to give you more attention and managing your body and mind to give you better quality attention.

So one key productivity lesson is to learn to be a bit kinder to yourself.

You can’t manage time but you can manage attention.
Unlike time, attention isn’t a fixed resource, and an hour of proactive attention is far more valuable than an hour of inactive attention.
It’s important to think about the quality of our attention and aim for Zen-like calm: that state where we’re interacting only with the thing in front of us, in the moment, and are not thinking about lots of other distractions.

So keep an open mind and don’t be afraid to dip in and out, cover the same ground twice, or skip bits to return to later.

The science bit is in the organizational structures, the use of tools and technology

You can’t manage time. There’s no point trying.

What you can manage is your attention, and it’s an even more subtle skill to learn.

Have you ever got to the end of a day where you’ve still got loads to do, you’re still motivated to do it and you have all the tools or information that you need, yet you’re still just staring into space? Under those circumstances, you’ll often tell yourself you ran out of time, but actually you just ran out of attention.

Improving your productivity can sound like a daunting, annoying and maybe even vague goal.

It’s difficult to know where to start, particularly when you’re so overloaded with things you have to do that you don’t even have the time to think about productivity, let alone make changes.