Have You Mastered the Art of Ignoring?

Focus, create, listen, read, educate, write, share and engage. What about ignore?

Ignoring is as important as engaging, and far more challenging. It requires us to turn off our attention or retune it to something far more remarkable.

Because of information overload—blogs and articles and updates and time-wasting on beautiful sites like this one—ignoring becomes a tough art to master.

When all we had was TV and radio, ignoring was as simple as a mute button, different channel or power switch. If nothing good was on, that was it, we were done.

But now there is no mute button or power switch or same 13 channels. Now you leave one platform for another, and there’s always something good on. Always.

We are as much part of our information as our information is part of us. Separation is futile, but ignoring isn’t.

How to Ignore:

1. Separate remarkable from crappy.
2. Keep the former and dump the latter.
3. Skim everything else, then refer back to step one.

*Bonus step: don’t hesitate to dump the once remarkable but now crappy.

Photo by jakerome.
[Disclosure: some links on this post are affiliate].