The first time I read Seth Godin’s thinking on emotional labor, I knew I had found a writer I wanted to learn from.  I had never really had a good term for what I knew was a vital part of community and co-working.  Now, as far as I can tell, Godin has done it again.

In his post from this past Monday, Godin spoke of mental bandwidth, the limited amount of quality attention you’ve got to do the thing you most want or need to do but that you so often use up doing (hiding in, really) everything else that fear uses as distraction.

The challenge, then, is a matter of finding ways to minimize “the leakage of mental bandwidth.”  How do you find space enough and time to do the work that is most important to you when so many other things are calling for your attention?  Godin remembers:

Before internet connectivity poured from the sky, I was able to get on a train, plug in my Mac and have nothing to do for four hours but write. And so I wrote. I once bought a round trip ticket to nowhere just to eliminate every possible alternative… pure, unadulterated mental bandwidth.

Perhaps the thought is nothing new: people have been writing about the science of attention for years.  But the image is potent, timely for our age of networks and connectivity and the overlap of so many of our resources.  From beginning to end, the post is a good one.  Take a moment and check it out here.