If you pay attention at every moment, you form a new relationship to time. Your own absorption slows you down internally. That slowing down feeds your sense of deep appreciation and at the same time produces more energy. In some magical way, by slowing down you become more efficient, productive, and energetic, focusing without distraction directly on the task in front of you. Not only do you become immersed in that moment; you become that moment.

For me, the antidote to busyness is remembering to be mindful and to practice being focused, engaged, and spacious. What does this mean?

FOCUSED: See what matters most, your ground truth, your creative gap, the most important thing, and focus on that. Come back, over and over, to the simple, yet difficult question: What is my priority right now? What is the most important thing to accomplish in this call, this day, this week?

ENGAGED: This refers to your level of energy and attention. Whatever the task, engage with it fully till it’s time to move to a new task. In general, I find I can remain fully engaged with tasks in forty-five- to ninety-minute increments, then it helps to take a short break of five or ten minutes. When working, engage with your full energy, then completely disengage and relax.

SPACIOUS: This refers to bringing your attention away from concerns about yourself and noticing the space and openness, literally, that exists around you, wherever you are. At the same time, notice stress without becoming stressed. Expect stress, anxiety, and fear to arise at times, and let them go when they do. Studies show that stress and busyness aren’t the real problem; the problem is our relationship with stress. In one study, people who believed that stress was inevitable and positive had greater well-being than those who believed that stress was negative and something to be avoided. Further, those who had a positive attitude about stress lived longer than those who experienced relatively little stress in their lives.

Dr Paul Brown, Faculty Professor at Monarch Business School in

Switzerland, explained this to me. He had noticed that these ten behaviours not only work; they work every time.

He said that the reason for this dependable quality of thinking is that generative attention, uncorrupted and sustained, calms the brain’s amygdala, the emotional ‘control centre’ of the brain, producing hormones like serotonin and oxytocin. These hormones then ‘bathe’ the cortex, the cognitive ‘control centre’ of the brain, allowing a perfect interplay between these ‘approach’ hormones and cognition. And because the listener’s attention doesn’t waver, and we know it Wont, the amygdala stays calm, and thought-disturbing hormones like cortisol and adrenaline stay at bay.

And even this architecture of distraction is not the molten centre of the problem we are facing. That core is the fact that multiple distractions chemically kill discernment. Distractions, as we have seen, raise anxiety, i.e. cortisol and adrenaline, in the brain. These hormones in turn reduce our ability to think for ourselves. They make us want to give in to the wandering hands of distractors. This design of distraction is, therefore, not an oh-I-apologize, just-ignore-me-please by-product of the platform architecture. It is the goal of the architecture. It sets out to generate the hormones that make us want more distraction.

In fact, just the other day I was sent an analysis of this phenomenon by Alan Lightman, physicist and writer:

By not giving ourselves the minutes – or hours – free of devices and distractions, we risk losing our ability to know who we are and what’s distractions, we risk losing our ability to know who we are and what’s important to us. The destruction of our inner selves via the wired world is a subtle phenomenon. The loss of slowness, of time for reflection and contemplation, of privacy and solitude, of silence, of the ability to sit quietly in a chair for fifteen minutes without external stimulation – all have happened quickly and almost invisibly.

The situation is dire. We are losing our ability to know who we are and what is important to us. We are creating a global machine in which each of us is a mindless and reflexive cog, relentlessly driven by the speed, noise, and artificial urgency of the wired world. I would like to make a bold proposal: that half our waking minds be designated and saved for quiet reflection.

We need a mental attitude that protects stillness, privacy, solitude, slowness, personal reflection; that honors the inner self; that allows each of us to wander about without schedule within our own minds.