The Most Expensive Thing I Can Lose Is My Attention
My calendar looks almost beautiful.
Every half hour has a name. Updates. Reviews. Video calls. Customer conversations. A working lunch squeezed between two meetings that are both marked urgent.
I am moving. My projects are growing. There is always one more thing that needs my eyes on it.
Then I ask myself a simple question: when do I have an uninterrupted hour to think about where I am actually going?
I look at the calendar again.
Not to find the hour.
To realize it isn't there.
I measure almost everything around my projects: runway, conversion, burn, growth, the number of days until the next meeting. But attention is harder to put into a spreadsheet. And perhaps that is why I let it disappear so easily – one notification, one emergency, one well-intentioned request at a time.
Yet attention is where I notice what the dashboard cannot show. The unease in a team before it becomes conflict. The customer need that doesn't fit the current roadmap. The quiet sense that a promising opportunity is pulling the projects away from their own reason for being.
When every moment is already spoken for, those signals have nowhere to land for me.
Sometimes I imagine looking back at these busy periods in ten years.
I may not remember how much I got done.
But I will remember whether I left enough space to see where I was going.
Maybe leaving that space is a form of responsibility – to the life I am building, and to the direction I choose to give it.
I'm still trying to understand what that looks like in practice. Not more distance from the work. Just enough silence to hear what the work is asking for.