Attention is your scarcest resource – use it wisely

What is your scarcest resource during the work day?

Most people answer, without hesitation, that time is their scarcest resource. Well it is certainly finite, but actually I don't think it's your most scarce resource. After all, everyone has the same amount of time, and yet individual differences in productivity are enormous.

It is interesting to think that we talk about being in the 'information age' on the basis that progress is linked to the explosion of information over the last half century. According to this view, information is central to firm success - the firm's ability to harness information and apply it to commercial ends is the basis of competitive advantage. But nothing could be further from the truth. Information isn't scarce - it is ubiquitous. And as Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon first suggested 40 years ago, when information is plentiful, attention becomes the scarce resource.

The correct answer is your attention - your personal capacity to attend to the right things for the right length of time.

So perhaps the biggest challenge we face as individuals at work, and as leaders of others, is attention management. This means being thoughtful and disciplined about how we split our time between different activities, and also about how we encourage others to focus on the right things.

Consider yourself as an individual contributor first. If attention is your scarcest resource, the first thing you need to do is discipline yourself to avoid interruptions. So if you are working on something that needs real focus, say writing a report, then switch your phone to silent, and close down Outlook and Facebook. This is obvious stuff, but it's amazing how easily we get sidetracked.

Secondly, and more difficult, is figuring out when to stop gathering information. When I was a doctoral student, the cost of acquiring information was high - I had to go to the library and make my own copies of annual reports or academic papers. Today, such costs have shrunk dramatically, but the net result of easy access to information is we often keep on collecting long after we have enough to make a decision or write a report.

Thirdly, even though we live in an era of ubiquitous information, we should not be afraid to bring our intuition and emotion to the table. It is tempting to seek evidence to support every argument we make, but the most successful business leaders - from Welch to Jobs to Bezos - have always sought to combine rational and intuitive thinking. An ounce of real insight is worth a pound of data.

Finally, when we have plentiful access to information, we also need to find time for reflection. Think of this as a low-tech version of meditation or mindfulness: it simply means creating breaks in the day, perhaps during a commute or while taking exercise, where you make sense of the stimuli you have been bombarded with, and where your ideas are allowed to gestate. When I am feeling distracted, a half-hour swim is the best way I know for clearing my mind and clarifying my next work priorities.

What about your role as a manager of others? Remember, your team are as easily distracted as you are. They are also highly sensitive to stimuli and cues that come from above. If you start talking about, say, an impending cost-cutting initiative, you are manipulating your team's attention, whether you like it or not. Changes to job titles, to the layout in the office, to the agenda of the weekly meeting, to decisions about who gets promoted; all of these are attention 'cues' and collectively they shape people's view of what is important and, thereby, how they behave.

So if you recast your role as the manager of your team's attention, there are a couple of simple pieces of advice. First, keep the message simple and clear. If you emphasize different things each week, people will become confused, and will learn to tune out. But if you come back to the same message each time, the effect on your team's behaviour is likely to be substantial. For example, most mining companies start every meeting, even in a white-collar environment, with a 'safety' share - it's a simple but effective way of keeping safety top-of-mind.

Second, be clear on what the default focus of attention is, so that you can be strategic about how to shift your team away from it. Here's an example: a global software company was losing out on opportunities in Asia because every decision ended up prioritising the needs of the European business (its historical home base). The CEO moved himself (temporarily) to Asia; global team meeting times alternated between morning in Europe and afternoon in Asia; the Chair of the meeting alternated between the two locations; the agenda always included region-specific as well as global concerns. By manipulating these relatively symbolic cues, rather than changing the entire reward system or reporting structure, there was a marked shift in behaviour towards a greater focus on Asia but without a loss of attention to Europe.

By Julian Birkinshaw, professor of strategy and entrepreneurship, London Business School