After 30 years in finance, I decided to make it my life’s mission to help people find better ways to grow and manage their money. To me, the concept of money is magical - it allows us to trade good with anyone, anywhere in the world, even if we don’t have anything of value that they want.

One of the things I teach is that we can increase our income by bringing out the value hidden within ourselves. 

But recently, I started to wonder what happens when the opposite happens - when a monetary value is placed on something hidden within ourselves? Like our attention.

Who’s Battling for Our Attention?

How many times do you check social media while trying to read that article you promised yourself you’d get through? Can you count the number of times this week? Did you have time to complete a task, but you decided to put it off until tomorrow? How easy is it for you to be distracted by the slightest noise or flash and have difficulty returning to what you were doing before?

Attention has become such a precious resource in today's world that big tech companies now try to assign it a monetary value. So do marketers, politicians, the entertainment industry and mass media. 

Let's consider the implications of that for a moment: Attention isn’t just our time, it’s our focus. Things that are in our focus are more likely to become ingrained in memory, enmeshed with emotion, and factored into our decision making. 

Distraction can become a pattern, a habit, an addiction even.

And when powerful, influential companies place a monetary value on this part of our psychology, we can find ourselves in a battle for our own thoughts. 

Attention’s Effect on Work

Usually, grasps for our attention happens beneath our radars, which often causes us to internalize the behavior. 

This can result in self-blame or we begin to believe there’s something wrong with us when there isn’t. When, in reality, our brains just weren’t built to process the amount of information that’s been brought to us by the technological revolution on a daily basis. 

And while, historically speaking, work for most people is physically easier than it has ever been (laborers are helped by machines; more people work white collar jobs than ever, etc.), we still find it difficult to complete tasks with ease because there’s so much information to filter through.

When attention is what often makes the difference between success and failure, even more than talent, connections, or self-belief, being able to focus is crucial to our survival.

Out of an eight-hour workday, it’s estimated that we only spend about three hours being productive.

That’s five whole hours out of each day we spend on non-productive tasks, breaks and battles with our own attention. 

What could you do with five extra hours in your day? And how do we get them back?

Besides running off into the wilderness to escape all modern life for a few days, there are a few things we can do to regain our attention, and it all starts with organizing our thoughts. 

Organize Your Thoughts, Organize Your Attention

Attention is the amount of time and energy we give to any particular thing. It directs our consciousness and occupies our thoughts. 

When outside forces battle for our attention, we can turn to inside resources to protect ourselves. 

Mindfulness, in particular, can help us gain the clarity needed to organize our thoughts. 

For example, if we feel like failures for getting distracted by social media, mindfulness can help us make peace with the disappointment and self-frustration. Untangling the emotional knots then allows clarifying thoughts to emerge. We can then see that we’re not failures, but human and even though our attention is susceptible to manipulation, we still have the power to say yes or no to something that vies for our time. 

When we organize our thoughts, we organize our attention. 

Tips to Organize Thoughts

In addition to practicing mindfulness and daily meditation, here are a few ways to organize your thoughts:

1. Determine importance - What needs to happen right now? What can wait? Understanding how things need to be organized on the outside can help us get a better sense of how we need to organize things on the inside. Assign every task a priority, and give yourself an appropriate amount of time to complete them.
2. Collect evidence. Worry has the capacity to occupy all of our attention and send us off in a million different directions. What happens if…? Could that’ve meant…? Will there be a…? There’s one thing certain to stop worry in its tracks - evidence. Evidence is the death of worry. It anchors us in the world instead of our thoughts. This helps us organize information and decide on a course of action, leaving worry behind in the dust.
3. Get specific - Generalizations help us see the bigger picture, but they’re not helpful when we’re trying to focus our attention. Attention craves detail, so the more specific we are in what we want to direct our attention toward, the more likely it is to go there.
4. Externalize - Write things down no matter what it says and throw it away later. Or say them out loud when nobody is nearby, and refrain from judgment regardless of how crazy it seems. Externalization forces us out of rumination, freeing our attention up for other things. 
5. Switch off autopilot - Pay attention to the thoughts that come to you, then confront them, and then let them go. This helps us become aware of what’s happening when we’re in autopilot mode. 
6. Recognize abundance - Anxiety, worry, frustration, striving, envy, comparison…these all direct our attention toward fearful thoughts that make us feel like we live in scarcity. 
7. Relax - Tension absorbs attention, and relaxing our minds and bodies is one of the best ways to free up mental space. Mindfulness is a proven method to help us relax and reduce anxiety in any situation.

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Discover more about how organizing your thoughts can improve your financial life every Tuesday at 3:30 p.m. PT during my free live course, Fearless Finance.