Pay attention to the easy things

You may have heard that most car accidents occur near your own home. Between 1 and 5 miles seems to be the sweet spot. The most common type of collision is hitting parked cars, reversing and hitting walls or fences.

The idea here is that people feel familiar with their surrounding area and so therefore can pay less attention. Our brains being highly optimised machines do all this work for us kindly behind the scenes. It feels like it requires more effort to pay attention than to let your mind wander.

The same principle expands to IT. Having a large degree of experience in my field means I’m very comfortable around technology. I spend my days writing requirements, communicating complex ideas and processes to stakeholders. Occasionally I get the opportunity to jump into some real code where I’m at my most comfortable.

All of these activities require focus time. Putting some music on, or complete silence depending on the task at hand can help me get into the right frame of mind to work my magic.

It’s a shame that when I’m not focused that I can turn into a bumbling idiot!

I had to write a simple quiz for a client’s social Slack channel. A nice reprieve from hardcore technical development. Spending a few weeks, writing a couple of questions a day, I knocked something up in Google Forms. It had pictures and everything. This was a simple task that was enjoyable, and when I had added the questions, I felt the whole thing was done.

Having done what I viewed to be the hard part, I made my quiz live. Being in a bit of a hurry, I threw the link up on a couple of Slack channels and rushed off to my next meeting.

What could have possibly gone wrong? After all a quiz is a simple thing for an expert like myself!

1. I posted the wrong link; it initially linked to a spreadsheet doing some Monte Carlo forecasting. No quiz there.
2. Even when the link was corrected, the Slack preview still pointed to the old link which took me more time to notice.
3. After even more time someone pointed out that I wasn’t collecting email addresses for the quiz. I still have more nameless submissions that ones that I cannot attribute to a person.
4. I’ve still got to mark this quiz which is looking to be a laborious process!

While people told me the quiz was fun, from my perspective it was a bit of a disaster. I tried to kid myself that this was an exercise in “Fail Fast”. I did get some learns, one of which being that Google Forms provides a “Quiz” tab which will automatically do all the things where I tripped up.

But really, the main learn here for me is to pay attention to the easy things! I wouldn’t dream of releasing a piece of software and then running off without monitoring it. I’d also make sure that it was thoroughly tested, but these are complex problems. That’s why they have my attention.

When cruising around Facebook, I struggle to find the simplest of things to manage my friends list. I’m half asleep at the wheel as I roam weird and non-intuitive menus. But as a Product Manager when focused I can design and architect complete systems. Then I can go all the way down to minuscule parts of the UI and look at CRO and Analytics to optimize elements of a product journey.

On TikTok it takes me about 10 minutes to find the blueline filter, let alone use it.

Now if you’re in management and rapidly switching context as you juggle different projects, systems and people, it’s easy to not get into any focused work. You can slowly train your mind to have a shorter attention span. Outside of the all the meetings, you may find yourself switching off more frequently as your mind seeks to conserve precious energy.

It’s a bit like the car drivers that are far away from home. Their senses are heightened. They’re in unfamiliar territory and their attention is demanded. However, as soon I released that quiz, I became a car driver that reversed into their own fence.