Practice Tip of the Week | The Attention Management Model

Adapted and reposted from this article by Maura Nevel Thomas, MBA

Attention Management is Flexible for the Modern Day

We need a new toolkit to help us stay focused in the modern workplace, and this is where attention management comes in.

The practice of attention management is built for today’s open floor plan, tech-centric, always-on work. It enables us to adapt to what’s going on. It allows us to incorporate our priorities on a particular day or in a particular moment. It offers the opportunity to engage the most optimal brain state to achieve the best results in the moment.

For example, sometimes managing our attention means giving ourselves time for focused work. At other times, it means making sure we are fully present for others. Sometimes it even means not paying attention to work at all. On a lunch break, vacation, evenings and weekends, we need to give our brains time to recharge.

Attention Management Is a Collection of Behaviors

Think of attention management as the collective practice of a group of behaviors, including:

• Focus
• Concentration
• Mindfulness
• Presence
• Flow

As we practice this set of skills over time, we improve our ability to achieve our most significant results daily.

The Four Quadrants of Attention Management for Productivity

To determine how to best manage your attention at any given time, you can use Maura Thomas’s attention management model. These are the four quadrants of the model:

• Reactive and distracted — Multitasking. Most people’s typical state at work.
• Daydreaming — Mind wandering. Restorative for your brain.
• Flow — So absorbed you lose track of time. Well known from the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, but isn’t something we can control. Requires time in the fourth quadrant:
• Focused and mindful — Fully present and making an effort to maintain focus.

Here’s how to use the quadrants to improve your productivity:

Recognize the quadrant you are in. For example, let’s say you’ve been bouncing between emails, texts and drop-in visits all morning. You realize that you’re in the ‘reactive and distracted’ quadrant.

Figure out the quadrant you want to be in. In our example, you’ve lost focus on the important report you need to complete because you’re too distracted. The report is the kind of work you do best, but it also requires deep thought. So, you decide you need to move into ‘focused and mindful,’ hopefully achieving flow.

Make shifts to move to your desired quadrant. To set the stage for flow, you can take small steps to adjust the environment. For example, put white noise in your headphones if you work in an open office. For an additional boost, you can also limit interruptions by switching off your phone and logging out of your email.

Why Is Attention Management Important for Teams?

When your whole team understands attention management, it’s easier to agree on policies around communication, vacation and work-life balance. If your entire team is trained to use a workflow management system based on attention management, you will often experience exponential increase in team productivity. This is because when a whole team operates from the same playbook, it’s easier to empower each other’s productivity to achieve significant individual and team results.

Read Part I 

 Learn More about Attention Management