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Piyush Jindal

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Did your kid/nephew/niece score less than 490 out of 500 in the recently released results of ICSE & CBSE school leaving exams? If yes, then there is a reasonable probability that you are worried. What will be the future of the kid with marks less than 98%? Bizarre as it sounds, these marks reflect how our children are 'cracking the exam code'. But will high marks help these kids succeed in the workplace of the future?

What are the skills needed to succeed in the workplace of the future?
I believe the ability to pay attention to your thoughts is the skill that will differentiate the high performers in the workplace of the future. Here's why:

I recently finished reading John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood, a gripping true story of greed, lies and hubris in the Silicon Valley. Midway through the book, I found an interesting anecdote. A young mechanical engineer finds a way to manage his overbearing and annoying boss, Sunny. Every time Sunny mails the young engineer asking for some information, he replies with an email that is longer than 500 words. “That usually brought him several weeks of peace because Sunny simply didn’t have the patience to read long emails."

How many of us do that? Avoid reading long emails or skim through long articles?
Irrespective of which generation we belong to, Gen X, Gen Y or Gen Z, we all are now part of what has come to be known as Generation TL;DR (too long; didn’t read).

Welcome to the age of information overload. The information overload is not going to go away, and, in fact, will continue to increase relentlessly because the world has switched from the “filter, then publish" mode of the non-digital world to the “publish, then filter" model of the digital world.

We use time as the first filter to plan our priorities for the day. However, the world we live in today is no longer about time; it is about “attention". On any given day, you have about 8-10 hours of work time, but possibly only 3-4 hours of attention time. You may “block" your time for a 2-hour meeting, but you “pay" attention for maybe just 15 minutes. The verb “paying" just shows how valuable our attention is.

The primary filter, therefore, needs to move from “ how do I manage my time?" to “ how do I manage my attention?".
The good news is that it is possible to build an effective attention management strategy because this is going to be one of the most desired skills in the workplace of the future.

The first step in managing your attention is, well, to pay attention to your attention. In psychology speak, this is called metacognition, or thinking about your thoughts. Popularly practised as mindfulness, paying attention to your attention is about letting go of time consciousness, and building attention consciousness. If I am in a meeting, how focused am I in the meeting? Pause every few hours to check with yourself: What am I doing right now? Is it important for achieving the goals I set for myself? If not, why am I doing this? Technology is here to help

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