One morning, I was supposed to edit videos for a new course.
The editing is slow and demanding. There isn’t much novelty in it. You sit down, work through the footage and keep going.
Instead, I started looking at technical improvements I could make to my website.
The work looked useful. Some of it probably was useful. I could research tools, ask AI questions, compare approaches and tell myself I was improving the business.
By the time I noticed what had happened, the course videos were still sitting there.
This is one of the more convincing ways I lose my attention. I don’t abandon work for something obviously pointless. I abandon the most important work for a different kind of work that is easier, more interesting and endlessly expandable.
The cost is not one wasted morning. It is the repetition.
Each time I do it, I move a little further away from the work that would actually move my life and business forward.
The source
Epictetus, Discourses 4.12.1, in Long’s 1877 translation: “When you have remitted your attention for a short time, do not imagine this, that you will recover it when you choose; but let this thought be present to you, that in consequence of the fault committed to-day your affairs must be in a worse condition for all that follows.” The claim is stronger than it first reads. He is not saying a lapse is regrettable. He is saying attention is not a tap you turn back on at will, and that today’s lapse is charged to tomorrow. Hadot calls the opposite state prosochē, continuous vigilance, and describes it as “self-consciousness which never sleeps.”
The drill
Set three fixed checkpoints in the day. Not phone reminders, physical thresholds you already pass through: the kettle, the car door, the front step coming home. At each one, five seconds and one question: where was I just then? Do not grade it and do not fix it. Say the answer under your breath and carry on. By Friday you will have fifteen samples of where your attention actually lives, which is different information from where you assume it lives. The thresholds matter more than the answers, because a checkpoint you have to remember is one you will not.
From the studio
On Tuesday’s talk, Why You Knew Better and Did It Anyway, I look at why a decision can feel sensible in the moment and foolish the next morning. A four-minute handover note lets the clear-headed version of you leave instructions for the version whose internal scoreboard has changed.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1882875/episodes/19627933
Pick your three thresholds before Monday. Reply and tell me what they are.
Go well,
Jon.