Business Insight Zone

We live in a world of unfettered choice. In our business lives, in our private lives, with colleagues, family, or friends — our options are practically infinite. And no matter how much we test, read, buy, or sample, there’s always more where that came from. There’s more every day — every minute.

Yet we don’t live in a world of unlimited time. We don’t have unlimited attention or mental energy. Indeed, time and attention are exactly the things that come in the most sharply limited quantities. (Shameless mercenary note: this is why Hoover’s exists — because you don’t have time to go digging up detailed company information yourself.)

Our thousand avenues of communication — from Twitter to the good ol’ landline on your desk — throw the gates open, letting all the world’s fascinating people and ideas (along with the duds) stake a claim on our attention and on our precious time.

• Our colleagues ping us day and night.
• We proof the PowerPoint deck from home at 11 p.m.
• We answer the Facebook message from an old friend we haven’t seen in years.

This is how we work and live now, many of us, and it’s brought us all manner of good things. What it hasn’t brought us is . . . time to think.

Sometimes you have to close the gate. Not to deny all entry to those outside, but to reinforce a useful boundary, one that helps you to do better work.

When the gate is closed, you can still check the weather. You can still smell the flowers. You’re in earshot of the street. But you’re not at the mercy of every ping, ring, buzz, and beep that wants a piece of your attention.

I’m thinking of this because I’m looking at a giant stack of blog posts that are between 5% and 95% done. Even if some of them turn out to be brilliant, they’re not doing you any good for as long as they’re unfinished, and they’re not doing me any good while they’re weighing on my mind.

Yet it’s so easy, out of simple habit, to launch myself back into the tide of new information that washes in each morning. E-mail, news headlines, RSS feeds, Twitter streams, updates from Facebook and LinkedIn — the list keeps growing.

So, just for a little bit, I’m swinging the gate shut. Behind the gate, those blog ideas can ripen into more posts that you’ll want to read and I’ll be proud to publish. (And some of them, no doubt, will be put out of our misery before they ever see the light of day.) If I do this right, you’ll see more posts, and better posts, in the days to come, and you’ll get quicker and fuller answers to your comments — which I wholeheartedly encourage you to make.

But if I do it right, you’ll also see much less of me in other venues. I won’t go on a tear of commenting on others’ blogs, at least for a week or tvo, and I may be a little slower answering e-mail, and I won’t tweet so much.

But when it’s all said and done, I hope you’ll agree that it’s worth it.

~ ~ ~

“Good fences make good neighbors.”
~Robert Frost

~

(Photo by tifotter.)