Too many goals and too little time? How to focus your attention

Time is precious and we never seem to have enough of it. We have to work, feed ourselves, clean our homes, take care of kids or family members, catch up with friends, sleep ... and on top of that, there are endless hobbies or pursuits we'd want to do if only we had more hours in the week. Is it any wonder we feel like we're constantly scrambling? This episode, how to carve out time for that passion project. Life Kit experts share tips on how we can be intentional about our attention. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Mint Mobile. Ditch overpriced wireless and get premium wireless for less. Go to mintmobile.com/switch to see which plan works for you.

• 0:11Marielle Segarra?

  You're listening to Life Kit from NPR. Hey, everybody. It's Marielle. Lately, I've been loving the idea of becoming a Renaissance woman. You know, a Jill of all trades, the gal who can do it all. Because I have a lot of interests. I like to read fantasy and adventure novels, play around with fashion and colorful makeup. I have many spiritual pursuits. I just took a woodworking class, went roller skating and loved it. I enjoy rock climbing and yoga and music. I'm planning to learn the drums, and I also have a ukulele sitting in my closet waiting for me to pick it up. I'd love to get back into tap dancing. Oh, there's sewing, too. Got a sewing machine for Christmas, and I just turned it on this week.

• 0:56Marielle Segarra?

  OK, I can see how my plate might be a little too full.

• 1:02Marielle Segarra?

  Truth is, we can only spread our attention so thin.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  When you get to the end of your life, the sum total of all the things you paid attention to will have been your life. If there are some friendships there that you've never actually paid any attention to, well, you didn't really have those friendships, right? I mean, if there was an interest that you had that you never actually spent any attention pursuing, well, you didn't really have that interest. So it really matters what we're paying attention to because it just adds up to a life.

• 1:31Marielle Segarra?

  This is Oliver Berkman. He's the author of 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. The book is about how to manage the limited time we have on Earth, which, if you live to 80, comes out to about 4,000 weeks.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  And even if you're incredibly lucky in terms of your lifespan, it's still going to be a very hard limit. And this has lots of ramifications for how we think about using our daily time that I think we don't pay enough attention to.

• 1:59Marielle Segarra?

  On this episode of Life Kit, how to focus on the things you're actually excited about and the activities and pursuits that align with your values. This will likely mean putting some things on the shelf for now and clawing back your attention from social media and all the bright and shiny things that happen inside your phone. Oliver and other Life Kit experts are going to share tips on how we can be intentional about our attention.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  This message comes from Mint Mobile. Ditch overpriced wireless and get premium wireless for less. Go to mintmobile.com/switch to see which plan works for you.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  This message comes from Donors Choose. Right now, there's a student that needs something. Maybe it's books, art supplies, or a science kit that will unlock their learning potential. And you can be the reason they get it. With Donors Choose, you'll fund real classroom projects from real teachers, so your gift goes exactly where it's needed most. Because when students start with what they need, they're ready to build confidence, discover new ideas, and succeed all year long. Give what students need right when they need it at donorschoose.org-local. This message comes from Midi Health. Most women never get real answers about their hormonal health. Midi is changing that with virtual care covered by most major insurances.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Understand your hormones. Visit joinmidi.com to book your first visit today.

• 3:41Marielle Segarra?

  I think most of us feel scattered a lot of the time. We have our jobs, we have to feed ourselves, we need to clean our apartments or houses, take care of our kids or family members, catch up with friends, work on creative projects. Is it any wonder we feel like we're constantly failing at everything on our to-do list? And yeah, there are some basic needs that we have to meet. But beyond those, take away one is to pick one main goal at a time and lock in. So maybe you want to finish writing a book or actually learn how to use that sewing machine if you're having trouble choosing from your list of interests. Karima Bats has some advice for you. She's a rock climber who founded the Adaptive Climbing Group, a climbing program for people with disabilities.

• 4:28Marielle Segarra?

  Rock climbing was not on her radar until she went through a difficult transition in her life. She had undergone treatment for cancer that required her leg below the knee to be amputated, and she was trying to accept those changes. Part of that journey meant finding new ways of moving and feeling good in her body.

• 4:44Speaker 04

  And I purposely chose the rock climbing because I had literally never done it before.

• 4:49Marielle Segarra?

  So Karima's advice for picking a hobby, interest, or a new project is to start with a wide lens.

• 4:55Speaker 04

  Pick three things that seem interesting, and then pick two things that you think you would never like.

• 5:02Marielle Segarra?

  You might look for ideas online, ask your friends what sorts of activities they've liked doing recently, or find a list of creative workshops in your area. You can try out a one-time class to gauge how interested you actually are in something. And then, as you're narrowing it down, consider your values at this moment, your needs, and what it feels like is lacking in your life. You might also cross some things off for logistical reasons, right? The cost, the commuting distance, the amount of time you'd need to commit.

• 5:31Marielle Segarra?

  Whatever you land on, get ready to devote regular attention to this pursuit. And that means...

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Choosing in advance what to fail at. I think that is a lovely idea that I got originally from the author John Acuff.

• 5:43Marielle Segarra?

  Accept right now that something in your life is probably going to slip through the cracks as you pursue this goal or interest. If you're spending a ton of time doing activities that'll help you meet new people, for instance, you're not going to be at home as much. You might have to be OK with a messy house or with eating out more. Or if you're focused on tap dancing, you might not also have time for rock climbing every week. Better to decide now what you do want to fail at than discover sometime down the road that you didn't do anything because you were trying to do it all.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  When you realize that, in fact, you were going to have to fail at something, you decide it in advance. It's a lot more pleasant because you don't put the effort in the first place. You don't have to then keep beating yourself up for not doing something that humans can't do.

• 6:27Marielle Segarra?

  Concentrating on one goal at a time means you'll probably finish it more quickly. And when you do pour into your passion, it can give back to you as much as you've given to it. When Karima started climbing, she got her independence back, and she found a new community.

• 6:41Speaker 04

  You know, no one's doing it for you. You know, no one's giving you an extra help in a way. It's all you. And I think especially as a person with a disability... That feeling I was struggling with, which I find a lot of people with disabilities tend to struggle with is about when you have a lot of able-bodied people around you. You know, are you doing it yourself? You know, who's helping you? That sense of independence is super important to us and being self-sufficient. And I feel like climbing does that, but at the same time allows to bring people together.

• 7:14Marielle Segarra?

  Okay, I want to tell you about someone else's goal now. Her name is Leah Schaefer, and she's been working on a novel about vampires.

• 7:20Speaker 05

  And she goes to his hill country home, and they sort of trade blood for a safe place for a little while, and then some other vampires come in.

• 7:28Marielle Segarra?

  A few years ago, Leah had managed to write one draft of this book. But in the past year?

• 7:33Speaker 05

  I've rewritten this three times, I think maybe, maybe three and a half. And I wrote two more books, terrible books, but each better than the last.

• 7:43Marielle Segarra?

  Her progress took off when she met Jamie, her accountability partner. He's an author, too, and they met online.

• 7:48Speaker 05

  I was on TikTok, and just some random dude was like, does anybody want to be accountability buddies with me? And I was like, I don't even know what that is, but sure, I'll try it. And then we met, I think that same week on Zoom, and we have been meeting every week, every Friday at nine o'clock for over a year now.

• 8:06Marielle Segarra?

  He tells her his goals for the week, and she tells him hers. Here's an example from the week we interviewed her.

• 8:11Speaker 05

  When we meet on Friday, I am supposed to have gone through my first 10 chapters in my novel for revisions and recorded five TikToks. And he's doing, you know, he'll do some marketing, book marketing, because he's got some books out. He'll do some writing goals, and sometimes we have.

• 8:30Marielle Segarra?

  Leah has done more work on this novel in the past year than ever before.

• 8:34Speaker 05

  I definitely don't think I would have gotten the work done this last year if I hadn't had Jamie as my buddy and met every week. I would sit there in our Zoom meetings and think, I should, quote unquote, should, be able to do this alone. But there is some kind of, like, there's some magic in it. Like, it's, I highly recommend it.

• 8:52Marielle Segarra?

  So our takeaway, too, is to find focus in community.

• 8:57Marielle Segarra?

  Humans are social animals.

• 8:59Speaker 06

  People have been working in groups from the beginning of times. We do things with others and when others are not around, they are in our mind.

• 9:11Marielle Segarra?

  Ayelet Fishback is a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. One finding from her research is that in the presence of other people, our actions feel more meaningful to us. And that's true even if they're strangers.

• 9:25Speaker 06

  We had people in China playing badminton as part of some event. And when there were more people in the audience, they felt that they either contributed more to the win or contributed more to the loss, but what they did mattered.

• 9:43Marielle Segarra?

  If you're struggling to make the time for one of your goals or to stick to it, to keep practicing, it could help to team up with a person or a group of people willing to carve out space and focus together. The classic example of this is a running buddy or a running group. But there are so many other versions of this, too. Book club, drummer circle. I mean, there's a group in Brooklyn that meets once a month to carve wooden spoons. I went to their last meetup. It was great. What I'm saying is, you can find your people.

• 10:13Marielle Segarra?

  Our next takeaway, takeaway three, is to tap into the power of routine. Cynthia Pong is the founder and CEO of Embrace Change, a career coaching firm focused on women of color. She says another way to keep moving toward our goals is to create defaults in our lives.

• 10:29Speaker 07

  Most of us grew up through some sort of school system where there's a lot of structure and you have to do things on a certain timeline, within this container, turn things in. Someone else is grading. Like, there's that entire dynamic and so it becomes really ingrained.

• 10:44Marielle Segarra?

  Think about the routines you have that make goals easier for you. Having healthy teeth likely doesn't need to be a goal if you brush your teeth and floss regularly. Or if you get in the routine of biking to work, you'll advance in your fitness goals without needing to spend extra brain power thinking about the how.

• 11:00Speaker 07

  We've got 1,000 reasons why we shouldn't do the thing. But if it's like a standing situation and you just get into that routine, it will just become reflexive.

• 11:11Marielle Segarra?

  And reflexive is the operative word here. Routines help take some of the mental load off of us by making our behaviors automatic.

• 11:21Marielle Segarra?

  So we've been talking about strategies to hold ourselves accountable to a goal. Another way to come at this, takeaway four, is to improve your memory. You likely won't make a lot of progress in your chosen skill or interest if your memory is scattered across a bunch of different things and you're not remembering what you learned the last time you practiced this skill. Luckily, you can improve your memory. To understand how we do that, we're going to walk you through how a memory gets made. And you're going to hear from Lisa Genova, a neuroscientist and author of the book, Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting.

• 11:55Speaker 05

  First, your brain takes in all the sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes, the meaning, the emotion, the language of what you perceived and paid attention to, and translates all of that into neurological language.

• 12:11Marielle Segarra?

  Then your brain weaves all of that information together. The important part here is that memories are multisensory, and the more senses involved in a memory, the stronger it becomes. Also, at a future date, if you activate your senses in the same way, the other details of a memory can come flooding back. This is something we can use to our advantage. Let's say you're trying to learn Spanish or get good at the tuba, and you're sitting down to practice. Form a habit where you light a candle, or spray a certain essential oil into the air, or put a heating pad in your lap, something that stimulates your senses. And then the next time you go to practice, do the same thing.

• 12:47Speaker 05

  So if I'm in the same physiological, emotional state, if I have the same kind of cues, oh, there was this scent, there was the sound, if I was listening to Dua Lipa, and then like if I have a chance to like listen to Dua Lipa while I take the test, it might help me remember those vocabulary words.

• 13:03Marielle Segarra?

  Okay, takeaway five is to eliminate distractions, or at least the ones that aren't nourishing you.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  If you're paying attention to things that, on some level, you don't want to be paying attention to, you're just giving away the only precious thing you have, right, which is the time of your life.

• 13:23Marielle Segarra?

  I know Oliver's right, but it's really hard to resist the pull of things like social media. I don't have accounts on most social media platforms. I do have a private Instagram, but I don't even keep the app on my phone. I only look at it on the browser. Even then, you know, one second I'm watching a video my friend sent, and 20 minutes later, I'm down a rabbit hole looking at another video about the new purple wiggle and how hot he is.

• 13:50Marielle Segarra?

  He really is, though. That hole I get sucked into, that we all get sucked into, not only distracts me from my goals, but it leaves me feeling stressed and guilty.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  This happened to me when I had around 12 to 13 hours of connected devices and smart devices used. I felt stressed, I felt anxious in a way that I hadn't, and that was difficult.

• 14:12Marielle Segarra?

  Jose Briones is the author of the book, Low-Tech Life: A Guide to Mindful Digital Minimalism. Right after college, Jose found that his life had been overtaken by screens, and he was spending all of his time passively. He decided to do something drastic. He traded in his smartphone for a boring phone, you know, a basic phone without a ton of apps or social media.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  So what I have done since I switched to a more basic phone is I go for walks. Every two to three hours, I have a dog that is quite active, and he helps me in this. So I go on a walk with my dog in the neighborhood, and I just take that time to recompose, think about what's just happening in my life, and processing all of the different aspects of it.

• 14:56Marielle Segarra?

  The time that Jose would have spent on his phone is still unstructured alone time. That hasn't changed. He's just more mindful during it. By the way, the end game with cutting out distractions isn't to just put all that time towards work. It's to be intentional about where your time goes so your rest feels more like rest, and so you're rejuvenated and excited for the time you are working towards something. You might slowly find yourself reclaiming interests that you've abandoned over the years.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  I've been able to recover a lot of those habits that I used to have in university: reading books, just taking time, better sleep, exercising, walking, just going out and thinking about my day, and having better relationships. And I was able to, at the same time, start a hobby to help people find what's the best path for them. So I guess I gained a lot of skills and a lot of different things during this time period that have made my life more satisfying.

• 15:52Marielle Segarra?

  That brings me to one final point. The quest for peak performance and peak focus can, if we're not careful, block us from experiencing life. It's easy to lose a sense of an experience, which is Is in itself wondrous by demanding that the experience produce outcome. That's Dr. Stuart Brown. He's a psychiatrist and founder of the National Institute for Play. And he says, when you're doing something simply for the end result, you lose joy in the process. Hyper focusing on productivity can also get in the way of us finding new activities that we might love.

• 16:32Marielle Segarra?

  So while you're letting yourself focus on one main goal, also allow yourself time to try new things and be bad at them. Or to just sit in silence. The next big project can wait. Remember, you can't do it all. Not in this lifetime. But Oliver says there's beauty in that because in accepting our limitations, we can really start to make the most of our time.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  I think there's a lot of very meaningful projects and activities, both in personal life and in work, in activism, in all sorts of domains, where it's very useful to think, what if I judge the value of this task not by whether I'm going to see the world saved from climate chaos, or whether my parenting ended up creating wonderfully successful human beings, or whether this organization finally manages to bring justice to this corner of the world, or something like that, but just see it as valuable as a part of a very long chain

• 17:38Speaker 02

  that has, you know, people who've been there centuries before you and have people who'll be there centuries after you and just sort of focus on what you can do in the little stretch of time that you have.

• 17:52Marielle Segarra?

  All right, it's time for a recap. Takeaway one is to focus on one goal at a time and choose the things you're willing to fail at. Takeaway two, find a community or a buddy to help keep you accountable. Takeaway three, build routines so you have more energy to focus on the things you're excited about. Takeaway four, improve your memory with sensory cues like scents and sounds. Takeaway five, eliminate the distractions that are not nourishing you. And then before you move on to your next pursuit, take a break, be aimless, do some things just because you feel like it. They might lead you to another activity that you're gonna love.

• 18:33Marielle Segarra?

  For more Life Kit, check out our other episodes. We've got one on how to move more and another on how to boost your mood. You can find those at npr.org/lifekit. And if you love Life Kit and want even more, subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org/lifekitnewsletter. Also, we love hearing from you, so if you have episode ideas or feedback you want to share, email us at [email protected].

• 18:57Marielle Segarra?

  This episode of Life Kit was produced by Margaret Serino. Our visuals editor is Beck Harlan, and our digital editor is Malika Gharib. Megan Cain is our supervising editor, and Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andy Tagle, Claire Marie Schneider, Sam Yella-Horsekessler, and Sylvie Douglas. Engineering support comes from Patrick Murray. I'm Marielle Segarra. Thanks for listening.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.