5 Tips on How to Improve Your Attention

Fewer Better Things is now a Substack Bestseller - the word is spreading. Plus tips on running, staying focused, and how to make things worth making.

Fewer Better Things became a Substack Bestseller this week so a big heartfelt Thank You! to all paying subscribers that is making this publication and journey possible. I deeply appreciate your support and will continue sharing the ethos of how fewer better things can lead to a simpler, richer, and more fulfilling life in a noisy, cluttered, and complex world.

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Reading books will improve your attention span, ability to concentrate your focus, and experience the magic of being fully absorbed. Plus teach you something valuable and expand your vocabulary and thinking. Photo: Jairph.

I believe that mastering our own attention is the path towards self-fulfillment, where we live our lives on our own terms. When we allow ourselves to get distracted by the trivial, we are giving away our limited and valuable attention for free.

But first, let’s get the definition of attention straight:

Wikipedia defines attention as “the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether considered subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information.”

“...a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention...” – Herbert A. Simon, Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics

Attention is the mind’s eye; it’s what we choose to focus our limited awareness on during every moment of the day while we ignore any distractions that are trying to disrupt this focused awareness and concentration.

Where is your attention when you are reading this text? Are you calmly concentrated on the words and their meaning or are you also thinking about or doing something else? Maybe your mind is already on your next “task”.

Understanding how and on what we spend our daily attention is important for our wellbeing and productivity. If we become fully aware of what we spend our attention on every day we can reduce the superfluous and increase the meaningful.