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[Brad Blackman]

From the blog post "Time and Attention":

Until you respect people's time and attention, you're not likely to earn much respect -- except by bullying. And that's not "real" respect.

How have you dealt with harnessing your own time and attention to better focus on important projects and -- perhaps more importantly -- relationships? And what if you were the person being ignored? How did you deal with that?

[Stephen Smith]

I was at the SOBCon conference this weekend, and I was very impressed with how respectful everyone was of other folks' time and attention bandwidth. So many conversations were opened up to new visitors and participants. It was like watching the comment thread of a blog unfold in real life.

[Brad Blackman]

Wow, that's very cool, Stephen.

[whitehatblackbox]

Hi, this is my first post.

Something I've noticed in my own life is that a lot of technology I use is built to catch my attention: my cell phone rings, thunderbird (my email client) has that popup that lets me know when I get an email, gchat blinks and makes a sound when I get a message. Individually these are useful, but combined it is overwhelming.

I had to disable the noise on gchat because I would often get non-vital messages from my boss, I disabled the email alert, and I had to learn to ignore my phone sometimes. How do you guys beat off things that try to steal your attention?

[Stephen Smith]

It is important to turn off any alerts that are distracting you, in fact, sometimes I shut down my e-mail client all together in order to get some work done!

[Brad Blackman]

The problem is so many people seem to refuse to turn it all off. They seem to be afraid they'll miss something "important."

[whitehatblackbox]

Exactly. So when everything is important, then people just get stressed out all the time. My friend likes not answering his phone when talking to other people. They freak out, even though it's not their phone and say "aren't you going to pick that up?". He likes pretending to think about it and go "naw"

[Stephen Smith]

>>Brad, the people that are afraid of missing something "important" are the ones who need to site down and take some time to determine the difference between important and urgent.

I wrote a whole series of posts about this, but here is a relevant snippet:

    Put First Things First. Here, Covey describes a framework for prioritizing work that is aimed at short-term goals, at the expense of tasks that appear not to be urgent, but are in fact very important. Delegation is presented as an important part of time management. Successful delegation, according to Covey, focuses on results and benchmarks that are to be agreed upon in advance, rather than prescribed as detailed work plans.

This habit is so important that Stephen Covey wrote an entire book about it, which I recommend to everyone that I meet!