Freeing Your Attention: What Financial Planning Is Really For

Time is not the only resource we have to manage carefully. Our attention may be even more limited.

A few years ago, as I was preparing to complete my MBA at the University of Michigan (Go Blue!) I found myself facing what felt, to me at least, like a yawning chasm of free time. Matt likes to say that I fill calendars like air fills a room, and he’s not wrong. My family’s running joke was that I would last only a year before enrolling in a doctoral program, and they weren’t entirely off base.

I love academic environments and learning in general. But as I considered what I would do with my newfound free time, I became distracted by what seemed like a more important question.

Sure, I could find tasks to fill the time — join a gym, get into baking, take up birding. But the choice was not only about how I would occupy my time. It was about where I would focus my attention.

Paying Attention to What Holds Our Attention

Around that time, I found an interview between one of my favorite academics, Adam Grant, and one of my favorite authors, John Green. On their own, I would read almost anything either of them wrote. Getting to read their conversation together felt like an especially good gift.

For those less familiar, Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School who has built an impressive body of research around, in his words, “how people find motivation and meaning,” among other things. John Green is the bestselling author of several young adult novels, including The Fault in Our Stars and one of my favorites, Turtles All the Way Down.

In their interview, they discussed the importance of paying attention to, ironically, what we pay attention to. In the middle of the conversation, Adam asks John how one of his recent books came about. John says:

“…And then, as I started to get better, I re-read the work of my friend named Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who had died a few months earlier. And I read this moment where she says, ‘Pay attention to what you pay attention to if you want to know what to do with your life.’ And I realized that I had not been paying attention to what I was paying attention to. I just, I was kind of letting the information flow happen very passively in my life. And I wasn’t paying that kind of careful sustained attention, that really for me, is the way toward hope and wonder and joy. And for me, that meant writing a series of extremely in-depth Yelp reviews about plague and penguins of Madagascar.”

There is so much in that statement that resonates with me.

We face a constant barrage of information, and it is easy to let our attention get hijacked. My husband and I recently started playing the Strands game in The New York Times. I have now spent a considerable portion of my life figuring out which letters connect to form the day’s “spangram.”

This is fun and harmless, except that my attention is a finite resource — arguably even more so than my time.

I have time to sleep, eat, and work. But the time I can be fully present is even more limited. That makes attention a resource worth considering carefully.

Financial Planning Is Also Attention Planning

For those familiar with our financial planning process, we root everything we do in a financial plan. In its simplest form, that plan is an in-depth assessment of your resources and what you want to spend them on.

We look at your money, your time, and, in some respects, your health and well-being. Then we ask: What do you want to spend these resources on?

The answers are often simple at first.

Most people want to travel while they still can. They would like to pay off their house. Usually, they want to retire as soon as possible while still feeling confident that they will have enough.

But the best financial plans eventually consider what your attention will be spent on, too.

It is not only that you want to travel. You may want to travel to see your children and grandchildren.

It is not only that you want to pay off the house. You may want to build something special, a place where memories can be made.

The financial goal matters. But the reason behind it matters more.

What Our Attention Reveals About Our Values

Later in the interview, Adam responds:

“And I was stunned in part because I had tweeted a couple of years ago, sort of a random thought that we reveal our goals through our actions, but our values through our attention and that if you want to figure out what’s really important to you, you should just scan what you pay attention to.”

On one of my later trips to Sherwood’s main office in Westlake, CA, Matt and I were talking about what I wanted to do next. Truthfully, I think he was trying to feel out the doctorate question like everyone else.

I surprised us both when I said I was ready to be a little bored.

Not because I enjoy being bored. I am genuinely incapable of sitting still. But I need margins if I want to focus my attention.

Ultimately, I want to focus on what I value. If my most precious resource is my attention, I want to make sure my “plan” has assigned it appropriately.

Using Wealth to Create More Room for What Matters

One of the things I have always enjoyed about wealth management is that it sits at the intersection of our resources and our values.

Many of us spend our whole lives saving, but it is not always clear what we are saving for. Without that clarity, we seek financial advice, and there is an endless supply of articles explaining how to maximize wealth.

That advice is often good and valuable. But it may not be the best place to start.

We want to make sure your estate is properly structured, and your taxes are managed efficiently. I am incredibly proud to work with a team that works hard to ensure you receive thoughtful advice on optimizing your wealth and the resources you have accumulated.

But I am even more proud to be part of a firm that takes the time to consider how technical knowledge and financial planning can simplify the firehose of information we all face — and free your most valuable resource: your attention.

Our time is short, and our attention may be even shorter.

We should all get to spend both on what matters most to us.

‍

^{Grant, A., & Green, J. (2021, June 22). Taken for granted: John Green wants you to pay attention to your attention (transcript). TED. https://www.ted.com/podcasts/taken-for-granted-john-green-wants-you-to-pay-attention-to-your-attention-transcript}

‍