We are often told that time is our most precious commodity. The message is that, regardless of how much money we make, we are all limited by the time we have on this planet. The Stoics have a phrase to remind us of this, memento mori—remember death—which highlights the fact that our time is limited. The Buddhists have a saying that we are to meditate on death five times per day. These are not meant to be morbid injunctions, but are intended to focus our minds on the fact that the time we have is finite, and so we have an imperative to use it well.
While these thoughts are not wrong, I’ve come to think that they are incomplete. They focus our attention on the scarcity of time, but miss something about what we actually do with it. Imagine a situation: you recognize that time is finite, resolve to spend more of it with your daughter, and then end up scrolling while you had planned to spend time with her. Or you resolve to spend time with your partner, go out to dinner together, and spend most of the dinner preoccupied with work problems. I’m on vacation this week, so imagine I’m on the beach in Hawaii, and instead of enjoying the waves and the sky and the sand, I’m thinking about the stock market. In all these cases, the shortness of life has been remembered, the time commitment has been made, but the end result misses the mark.
What is missing is not the recognition of what is important or the allocation of time, but where we direct our attention during that time. Attention, more than time, is our scarcest and most valuable resource. It can be stolen away from us much more easily than we would like to admit. We can spend all day with people we care about (time allocation) and barely interact with them (attention allocation). We can be physically one place—vacation, work, home, out with friends—but our attention can be somewhere else entirely. We might more closely align our lives with our intentions if we move away from thinking about how we spend our time and toward thinking about how we spend our attention. Allocation of our attention necessarily includes the allocation of time, but the reverse is not true. If we are directing our attention well, we are almost by definition also spending our time well. It helps us see that making time for something is the first step, but incomplete. We still have to direct our attention toward what matters, whether that means focusing on the work we are trying to accomplish or being present with the people we love.
The framework of attention also helps make sense of why we often feel dissatisfied with the choices we make about how we spend our days. We can objectively spend enough time at work, enough time with our spouse, enough time with our kids, enough time with our friends, but nonetheless feel disconnected from them, fail to accomplish what we want, or feel like we are standing still. When we review the calendar, it looks fine. But the calendar does not capture the lived experience of those hours: how present we were, how connected we felt, or what we actually experienced.
This framework helps make sense of social media and screens. Thinking about how screens redirect our attention during time we have intentionally devoted to what matters helps us understand how they hollow out so much of what is meaningful from our lives. There is also a cumulative element at work. Whether we realize it or not, we are always practicing how we direct our attention. Every time we follow an impulse without examining it, we are practicing following impulses. Every time we reach for something to change how we feel rather than staying with the feeling itself, we are practicing moving away from our experience. Every time we allow our attention to be pulled toward whatever is most stimulating, urgent, or emotionally charged, we are making that pattern a little more familiar. This might be a screen, a chemical, or a behavior. It is part of what makes addiction so powerful: through repetition, we become increasingly practiced at directing our attention toward the thing we have learned to use for relief or reward. Fortunately, the reverse is also true. When we practice staying with a difficult feeling, keeping our attention on a conversation, or noticing an impulse without immediately acting on it, we are practicing something different. We are strengthening our capacity to remain present rather than automatically following whatever calls for our attention.
This suggests that attention is not simply a resource we have to manage, like time. It is also a capacity we can develop. And just as we can become practiced at distraction, avoidance, and reactivity, we can become practiced at presence. Time is finite and largely outside our control. Attention is different: it is malleable, trainable, and responsive to practice. We cannot create more hours in a day, but we can change how fully we inhabit the hours we have.
Meditation offers perhaps the clearest way to deliberately develop that capacity. We can think of it as an attention gym, a training environment for attention. We deliberately choose where we want our attention to go, and then practice returning it when it wanders. We sit down intending to pay attention to the breath, and almost immediately something else appears: a thought about work, a sound outside, an itch, a memory, a plan for later. We cannot necessarily prevent those things from appearing, but we can practice noticing them without following them.
Our attention will wander—that is its nature. Something catches our eye, a thought arrives and pulls us somewhere else. But we can train how readily this happens, and we can practice coming back. We can become more adept at noticing we have drifted, and more readily return to what we intended to attend to. Then we drift again, and we return again. Every time we do this, we develop the ability to direct our attention rather than simply following whatever happens to capture it.
Within this framework, we can view our lives as the sum total of where we have directed our attention during the time we have on this planet. We are accustomed to thinking that time is all we have, and that our task is therefore to spend it wisely. But time simply passes. We cannot stop it, hold onto it, or know how much of it remains. What we can practice is where we direct our attention in each moment as it passes. At any given moment, our attention is somewhere. It may be with the person in front of us, with a worry about the future, with something that happened yesterday, or with whatever happens to capture our mind. We can be with our children and be thinking about work. We can be working and thinking about our vacation. We can be on a beach in Hawaii and be somewhere entirely different in our minds. The time is the same; what we experience of it depends on where our attention goes. The Stoic insight that our time is finite isn't wrong. But perhaps the more useful imperative is not simply to use our time well, but to pay attention to where we are putting our lives while that time passes.
Love,
Doc
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