February 22, 2021​

How are you doing right now? When you start to answer that question, your answer depends on how you use one of your biggest assets: your attention. What you focus on creates everything you experience.

This is no small issue for me. I work online every day, and I have an addictive personality. I have watched the internet become an increasingly difficult environment to maintain a focus in, and I want the advantages of this world without getting caught up in the many ways my attention can be hijacked by people who are constantly gathering information on what makes me tick.

I came up with an exercise that helps me think this through, and it goes like this:

Imagine that you have just won a lottery and the prize you won is “Food for Life”. You contact the people who set up the lottery and they tell you that you will be supplied all the food you need for the rest of your life, delivered daily, wherever you are in the world.

There is only one catch: you have to choose between plan A and plan B. once you make your choice, you cannot change your mind.

Plan A is an all you can eat 24/7 buffet, always within reach, full of the most decadent, spicy, addictive food that evil geniuses working for multinational profit driven companies can come up with. The nutritional equivalent of an endless supply of free crack cocaine…

Plan B is a diet tailored to your body and what makes you the most alert and energized. Fresh high-quality ingredients and supplements in the right amounts at the right time. A diet designed by people who love you and want the best for you.

Plan A is insane and plan B is ideal. Now, with that in mind think about your current mental diet habits (who you give your attention to). Who is in charge most of the time? A plan A evil genius or a plan B master mind?

When you start comparing media diets to how your food choices play out, the similarities are striking: Eat too much food and you get indigestion – your energy goes down instead of up. Consume too much information and your brain can’t digest any one thing long enough to make sense of it. You end up more confused than when you started. You go from “Aha!” to “I’m lost”

There is a saying in addiction recovery circles that goes like this: “you can never get enough of something that almost works”. When it comes to the current version of the internet search engines, what you are confronted with is a lot closer to Plan A than Plan B. Too much of the time, going online almost works for me. The reason I get thrown off course is because I jump in without a clear enough plan. I’m working to change this. I’m making a big sign to hang on my desktop computer that says “What’s the plan?” It is one of my latest attempts to get a little more control over my own mind.

“Have a plan before you go online” is a simple way to deal with a complicated problem. It may end up saving you hours of time chasing shiny objects when you could be getting something done. I am writing this on a very old laptop that is not fun to use for going online. I made the writing process more enjoyable by finding and installing a font called “traveling typewriter” that looks like an old-fashioned manual typewriter. It helps to put me into writing mode. In a short while I will send this to the big desktop so I can send this letter to you. That is my plan for this morning.

Writing this letter is another attempt to think more clearly about how I conserve and use my attention and I hope it has some ideas that are useful to you. Thanks for reading this and I will be in touch again soon…

Richard

==================================================

The Amazing Freeze Pedal I made a youtube video on a pedal I have been using for a while – the Electro-Harmonix Freeze Pedal. Play a note or chord, hit the button and it puts whatever you are playing into sustain as long as you want it. It is a cool way to make practice more interesting and fun. Go here to check it out.​

=================================================

One last thing – the Beginner harmonica course I now offer does not cost you anything but the time it takes to sign up. It is my best collection of ideas on how to get a strong foundation for playing the diatonic harmonica. You can sign up here.