High Tea: Time, Energy, Attention

Recently an Indian friend suggested that we gather a few friends for high tea. Lovely, I said, although this Texas girl wasn’t quite sure what that entailed. The phrase got me thinking about an important acronym, TEA, time, energy, attention.

The problem with attention

Many years ago when I started work on my PhD, I quickly realized I had a serious problem with attention and focus. I would start to read a scientific paper and could not for the life of me pay attention all the way through. It didn’t help that the math was way over my head at that point. I found this very disturbing for two reasons. One, I’d always thought of myself as a great reader. Two, I knew I would not be able to continue my PhD work if I couldn’t overcome this hurdle (along with others).

Life broke my brain

How did I get to this place? I’d always been bookish and nerdy. Why was my brain broken now? Was it old age, after all I was in my mid-50s? I reflected on this for several days and realized it was the way I had been living my life the past few years. I had been a teacher at an alternative high school for 8 years while my sons finished their K-12 education. Being a teacher in an alternative high school means that you had to (1) teach, (2) tutor, (3) give life advice, and (4) maintain a constant awareness of the students so you could head off drama before it started. I developed a 360 degree feel for the emotions in the room as I walked around helping students with their independent work. My radar would hone in on a student who was giving a death stare to another student, or on her phone posting trash about a student. I would zero in, help the student to refocus on what she was supposed to be doing, and move on. I’m happy to say that in my 8 years, I never had a fight break out in my classroom. It was a rough district, fighting was part of life for many of my students.

Your brain will become good at whatever you repeatedly ask it to do

My brain at that point was very good at paying attention to a classroom full of students. It wasn’t very good at sitting down and tuning out the entire world by being entirely focused on a single task.

Back in the day when I was a computer programmer, I stared all day at a screen or a printout, and had no trouble focusing all day every day. That’s what I asked my brain to do back then, and my brain learned to do it. Could I retrain my brain yet again?

How to avoid distraction

The enemy of attention is distraction. Unfortunately, we now live in a world where our gadgets are always alerting us to emails, texts, and a host of even more unimportant things. That’s how the tech companies keep us engaged, eyes on their apps, money in their pockets. It’s really awful how they have hacked our brains, so we have to hack them back. We do this by controlling our devices instead of letting them control us: turn off notifications, shut down apps or put them on a timer.

Find a healthy way to rest your brain

Often, people check their devices as a break (or escape) from the task at hand. This is a really bad habit, and can be a huge time suck. Even if you are disciplined enough to check your apps for just a 5-minute break, that 5 minutes glued to a screen is not really a break, is it? Why not get up, walk around your space, go climb some stairs if available, or work in a quick 5-minute set of jumping jacks, pushups, or other exercise? That accomplishes two very important things. The first is that it gives your eyes and your mind a break from screen time. The second is that it gets you out of your seat, and we know that sitting all day is bad. Another way to take a 5-minute technology-free break is to meditate for 5 minutes, which could be a walking meditation if you want to also move. Learning to meditate will also increase your ability to focus.

TEA: Time, Energy, Attention

Back when I was thinking about how to help myself re-learn how to focus in the early days of my PhD, I came across a YouTube video that explained the TEA acronym. I didn’t save that video, so let me describe it. The woman had a lovely Japanese tea set. She said that your time-energy-attention is like the tea, you need to control where you pour it. Let’s say that there are three things that are very important to you right now: time with your children, time on an important work project, and time for a creative hobby. She poured tea into three cups as she said this. Now, what if you are careless with your time, energy, and attention and you let it go wherever. As she said this she poured tea outside the cups and it spilled into the tray. This visualization of time-energy-attention was very helpful to me and I thought of it often as I got better and better of being in charge of my attention and re-learning how to focus.

Focus like a fiend

As my PhD progressed, I learned how to focus anywhere, anytime. At one point I started keeping a list of places I had worked on either the code or the text for my dissertation. It was various airports or coffee shops around the world, secluded spots around campus, you name it. I could now focus like a fiend. Again, the trick is to discipline your time-energy-attention, and to be patient with your brain as it learns over time how to focus for extended periods of time on tasks that are sometimes engagingly fun but sometimes difficult.

My friend and I haven’t had that tea yet, so I still don’t know what she means by high tea, but I think we can extend the tea metaphor into high tea by giving the TEA approach our highest priority. Make a plan for how you will use your time-energy-attention, monitor by journaling or other method on how you are implementing that plan, and revise as needed. I keep a spreadsheet of my daily schedule and monitor how I’m doing every day. I’ll talk more about that another time.

Make a TEA plan today!