Covid-19 and Reclaiming Your Most Valuable Resource

The isolation demanded by COVID-19 clarifies a distinction I’ve been wanting to make for a while regarding our most precious resource—what it is, and what it isn’t.

Many people will say that our most precious resource is time, and for good reason. Time is finite, and we often feel ourselves needing more of it. We call it being “busy”, and we do fill our lives with time-demanding activity, but I think that is actually a mask of the real problem.

In this moment, when we’ve had a significant number of demands on our time stripped away, the angst of being low on time has been just as quickly replaced. The same feeling is there, but now attaches itself to other causes. Although many of us have had to do our work in different ways, and that certianly takes a new share of time, the reality is that many of us now have something of a time-surplus. And yet, the thing that we used to name “I just wish I had more time” still remains.

I suggest that the actual scarcity has never been time, but attention. It is that resource which is impinged upon from countless directions, and this has not relented even in the midst of our physical isolation. Even as our activity calendars have drastically changed, we are presented with new pulls on our attention, and these are even more fierce than before.

This moment presents an opportunity to be truthful about our scarcity of attention…and to reclaim it with intention. One of the most significant things you can do through this crisis is become more purposeful in how you spend and invest your limited attention.