Hi Reader!

As this Spring morphs eerily fast into something of a Summer over here, I can imagine you plowing ahead in your dissertations and research projects, trying to make progress before the holidays come and we take a much-needed break. The everyday struggle to be productive consumes all of our attention and time, Yet, this week's newsletter brings you the idea of also taking an occasional breath and a step back (or two steps back). We bring you a newsletter-exclusive tiny idea that has been floating around my mind lately, precisely about attention. And a flashback to a reflection exercise (which I recently did on my birthday) that has helped me greatly in keeping a satisfying life direction.

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Flashback: Forget New Year’s resolutions – Do a Yearly Review instead​

(Tweet-length gists of past posts, so that you don't have to read through the whole blog backlog)

Although I'm a big fan of low-level, everyday processes like a daily review to improve doctoral productivity, focus and well-being, I also firmly believe that we need to take a higher, birds-eye view of our life and the thesis once in a while. Maybe every quarter, every semester, or even every year. The sense of direction it gives far outweighs the time/effort it takes:

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Tiny idea: Cultivate your attention

I’ve been paying a lot of attention to attention, lately. Not sure if it is because of the years of on-and-off mindfulness practice finally paying off, or because of the myriad moments of delight, boredom, frustration and sleep deprivation of new parenthood. I find myself agreeing with the realization of Oliver Burkeman, David Cain, the Buddha and many others throughout history, about the utter importance of attention. Attention is basically all we have to build our life experience. Everything depends on whether (and how) we pay attention and what we pay attention to.

This has become an especially important fact in the last decade or so, as our attention became increasingly assailed by our ever-present digital devices and other incredibly compelling technologies – look around you in the street, during your commute, at home, in your own life: how much of our time is spent paying attention to something engineered or designed to captivate our attention? Of course, not all of this is bad, but if we let go and set our attention adrift, we invariably end up riding the flow of other people’s ideas or our own self-sabotage monologue all the time. As PhD students trying to master a sliver of the vast ocean of human knowledge, trying to contribute something original to it, attention is our main tool.

The corollary is clear: train your attention. Cultivate it like a garden – it will take time and constant effort for it to grow strong like a bush or an oak. There’s many ways you can do this, try some mindfulness exercises if you feel like it, pay attention in a structured way as you self-interrupt while trying to write your papers, do a silent walk (really silent, no headphones!)… In general, pay more attention to every moment, however mundane (especially the moments of “doing nothing”, create some of those, too).

Any of them will be better than the current status quo of attention drift, so don’t sweat the choice. Life (including the boring, difficult or painful parts) will become weirdly richer, more enjoyable. Luminous.

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May you have plenty of both direction and attention!

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