A lifeguard doesn’t scroll in the chair. Some jobs make your attention the whole product.

RESILIENCE

WHAT THIS MEANS

In some jobs the output is not a product but your attention itself, so the moment it lapses the job is not being done, even though you are sitting in the right place. That is unlike tasks you can pause and resume, and it asks for a different discipline, because there is nothing visible to show for it. Watching looks like doing nothing and is the entire service. Nobody can tell from outside, and the consequence is real.

Identify which parts of your week are attention jobs rather than task jobs. Make your phone genuinely unavailable for those stretches, and build in short scheduled breaks instead.

A QUESTION TO SIT WITH

Which of your responsibilities is really just paying attention?

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