The more time you spend on trivia and routine, the faster you burn out. Routine work sustains your current standard of living — and nothing beyond it.
There are four levels of human attention. Our time gets distributed across them.
1. Trivia
Scrolling social feeds. Computer games. Time spent with people who don’t interest us doing nothing in particular. Films and series — not as rest, but as the main way of passing time.
2. Routine
All the ongoing obligations and projects we learned to handle long ago and have grown used to: talking to a client, going to the post office, refilling the printer, entering the right numbers into a spreadsheet, calling a supplier.
On tasks like these the brain is bored and does what’s needed on autopilot.
3. Tactics
These are new actions that don’t happen by themselves in the course of routine work: adding a new product, moving to a new office, changing the team’s incentives, hiring someone into a new role, introducing training for the team.
4. Strategy
These are decisions and actions that completely change the course of our work and our life: moving to a new city, starting to work with a new partner, opening a new business, closing down an old one, starting a blog, writing a book, building your own website.
The more time a person spends at the level of trivia and routine, the faster they burn out and the duller life becomes.
Routine work can sustain your current standard of living, but no more than that.
The moment we start doing tactics and strategy, everything changes.
A few correct tactical decisions per quarter will move our life and our work forward substantially. Here we’re talking about multiplying income and dropping stress considerably.
And if we make and carry out even one strategic decision a year, our life can take an entirely different course. It can mean income growing tenfold and the whole shape of our life changing.
When I plan and organise my work, I often check my four lists and look at where my attention actually is. As soon as I notice I’m spending all my time at the routine level, I start looking for and carrying out new tactical and strategic moves.
That approach lets us grow every quarter and keep expanding what we’re capable of.