Are you taking it all in? That is, are you sure that you’re noticing everything that matters to you, or could matter to you if only you’d noticed it? Could you do more with your life – or just enjoy it more – if you were more actively engaged in the world around you, in your day-to-day activities, your conversations, and the beauty of your everyday surroundings? Most importantly, do you approach the world as if it were full of value? No matter how much we try, we just can’t pay attention to everything – which means we sometimes miss things that are important. This is partially a matter of focus – we’re usually either bouncing around so much that we fail to pay adequate attention to any particular thing (the curse of the multitasker) or we’re so focused in on one thing that we fail to notice anything outside of the task at hand. But it’s also a matter of intention, of approaching our world with the right attitude. As a general rule, if you don’t intend to find value, you’re more likely than not to miss it. While it’s no guarantee, if you intend to discover value, you’ll find it – or at least greatly up your chances. How do we do this? Instilling an attitude isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world, right? I mean, it’s hard to literally change your mind to make it more sensitive to things that are valuable to you. But intention can be thought of as just another habit, and we have a pretty good idea about how to develop more effective habits: force yourself to do something until it becomes second-nature. In the case of developing a more intentional attention, the tools for this are already, very likely, part of your mental toolkit. If you’ve been reading Lifehack – or any other productivity-oriented site – for any length of time, you probably already know how much I and most other writers who focus on productivity advocate the idea of ubiquitous capture, of being prepared at any moment to write down or otherwise record anything and everything that crosses your mind, wherever you may happen to be at the time. Intentional attention is just an extension of ubiquitous capture; instead of focusing inward, it involves cultivating a constant readiness to capture external things – images, pieces of information, descriptions, snippets of text, whatever feels useful – to process and make use of them later. Unlike ubiquitous capture as we’ve discussed it before, though, intentional attention means having your capture tools out and ready to go before your attention is caught. By going into a situation ready to capture whatever might be interesting or valuable, you trigger your mind to expect to find interest and value in that situation. Consider, for example, several different cases: What about you? Do you have tools at hand to sharpen your focus so you can find and capture anything important that crosses your path? Or do you rely on luck, that maybe the world will hit you over the head with something valuable, and maybe you’ll recognize its importance, and maybe you’ll remember it in enough detail to make use of it? How about trying to cultivate the intention of finding value around you instead of simply hoping you do?
