Frugality, by definition, deals with the economical uses of resources. This includes not only money, but also time, and anything else that can be consumed or used.
Closely related to being careful with how we use our time, we also need to be careful with how we use our attention. We have evermore bright-and-shinys competing for our eyeballs and our process cycles, and we're expected by society to keep on top of things. One task, one project, one relationship blurs into another, and we get to make sense out of the blur.
Close calls because of divided attention
A good friend shared this post by Jennifer Meer of ScaryMommy.com on distracted living. With her husband on travel, she was holding the family together (no doubt very well, as mommies have a knack of doing). In the course of bathing her four-year-old daughter, she leaves the bathroom to tend to one of her other children, and responds to an email.
She returns two minutes later to find her daughter asleep in the tub. Her daughter was all right, but she herself was a wreck after that.
After reading this, my reaction was that the mom was being a bit hard on herself, and that her daughter would have been fine. My thinking was that a typical four-year-old would have plenty of strength to pull themselves up after their brain reflexively and soundly woke them up after they tried to breathe in water.
But Google proved me wrong. Bathtub drownings at this age happen all the time.
Yeah, it was a close call.
Multitasking shortchanges us
This kind of distraction can have tragic consequences. Some distractions only take a few seconds to have tragic consequences: texting while driving. I know first-hand that it only takes that length of time to blow through a red light and T-bone a minivan. Close calls are a miserable way to learn a lesson, but they're effective, for sure.
There are other less-tragic ways that splitting our attention shortchanges us:
- Job performance. This kind of split attention may be out of our control, or required for the job, but frequent context switching (going from one task to an entirely different task) results in inefficiency. And there's evidence that multitasking decreases efficiency as well.
- Relationships. Do you know people who, although they're not speaking while you're speaking to them, aren't really listening to you? Either they're checking their phone, or watching TV, or formulating what they're going to say in witty response to you. They're splitting their attention. And fairly or not, this affects the relationship with this person. Even if the other person isn't completely tuning you out, they appear to be partially tuning you out, and that appearance can be enough to affect the relationship. As I mentioned before, since my daughter responds to quality time, she will be especially tuned to when I'm not paying full attention to her.
- Calling. This is the one I struggle the most with personally. There are no shortage of good ideas, but there is a shortage of time to implement them. Trying to do too many at once will shortchange the impact I, or anyone else, will have in the short lifetime that we're all given. Matthew Paulson, former personal finance blogger turned entrepreneur and angel investor, and author of 40 Rules for Internet Business Success, has a number of profitable businesses, but he built them one at a time, not all at once. I think this is why some of my blogging contemporaries sold for beaucoup bucks, while I didn't. They concentrated their attention on that one blog, and it paid off.
What other areas of life is it especially important to be frugal with your attention?
