Attention is your scarcest resource
Like many people, I have most of my best ideas in the shower.This is sometimes annoying: I could use more than one shower’s worth of good ideas a day, but I’d rather not end up as a shrivelled yet insightful prune. Mostly, though, shower ideas are the incentive that keeps me smelling okay, so I grudgingly accept the constraint.The time when it was most constraining was the first time I became a manager. I only had a few reports, so managing them wasn’t a full-time job. But I was very bad at it, and so it should have been what I spent all my shower insights on.Unfortunately, I was spending my non-management time on programming. And even if I tried to use my showers to think about my thorny and awkward people issues, my mind somehow always wandered off to tackle those nice, juicy…
