My most recent trip might have gone better with more thorough planning.

I could have purchased a cooler and filled it with sliced vegetables and other healthy snacks.

I could have done my final errands earlier in the week so that I wouldn’t have been hitting the road along with the other weekend travelers, getting myself stuck in a long traffic jam behind a jackknifed tractor-trailer truck.

I could have avoided traveling on a holiday weekend in the first place.

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Our most precious resources include not just our time and energy, but also our attention.

I have observed that attention is finite. I see that in my students and clients, and I see it in myself over the course of a typical day. Attention gets used up, and we need to rest to replenish it.

But to the degree that we can focus, we can conserve our attention in order to accomplish what matters most.

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Nebulous tasks are always the easiest ones to put off.

Even if you have clearly defined what you are going to do (“Write first draft” or “Fill out recommendation form”), there is an ugly amorphousness to certain things on our to-do list. We just don’t know how long they are going to take, and we suspect that it isn’t going to be a fun experience to do them. This one is going to require an uncertain amount of effort, attention, and focus; that one requires us to pull something out of ourselves that we aren’t sure we have. It makes perfect sense to choose something smaller, better defined, or practiced.

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My most useless time of day is thirty minutes before a meeting.

Even if I set an alert on my phone, I have trouble focusing. I keep looking at the clock, shifting from window to window on my browser, and feeling restless.

I am telling myself a story about how thirty (and now twenty, and now ten) minutes isn’t enough time to get anything done. But the problem isn’t time at all. It’s focus.

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My sister, a mother of three, dazzled the crowd in the school talent show, accompanying her daughters’ singing on cup percussion.

No one had known she possessed this skill, and their minds were blown. “You’re so talented!” they exclaimed.

She shrugged. “I spent a few hours learning it.”

My sister’s real accomplishment was to believe she could accomplish what she set out to do, and then to follow through by putting in the necessary time. Anyone could; not everyone does.

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