The other day I found myself reading my blackberry as someone was talking to me.  I did not give it much thought and went on about my business.  Today, I read a post by Yaro Starak at Entrepreneur’s Journey here is an excerpt from:

Are You Giving Your Customers Full Attention- 

To pay attention to any particular person, you must reorder your mind to the thoughts of that person. You must think her thoughts, feel her feelings and want what she wants, or you are not paying attention.

Fast forward to your home life and your own bad habits acquired in the “attention age.”

Your child is telling you a funny story about what happened today in fourth-grade science class, and as you are “listening,” you reflexively glance down at your Blackberry. Not once. Not twice. But constantly throughout the conversation. Your child notices the distraction. Worse yet, he now feels that you are more interested in the Blackberry than you are in him.

So much for winning “parent of the year.”…

It talks about more than paying attention to your kids but wanted to quote this part.  As a father of three I find my attention is never 100% on them when they are talking to me.  I tend to wander off into TV land or the world wide web.  It’s interesting how modern technology such as wireless laptops are nice and convenient but they also take our attention away from more important things in life such as family. 

I ponder just the opposite before having a wireless laptop I would have to go into the home office which is in the back of the house the furthermost point.  That means the family did not see much of me during the time I was “working”. 

I guess the real question would be, Is 60-80% of one’s attention better than zero percent?

On my way to work this morning I noticed the truck in front of me had some thing going on in the front seats.  I continued to look a little closer and noticed this lady was combing her daughters hair while driving her to school.  That made think about the many distractions of driving.  Like this lady leaning over to the passenger seat coming her daughters hair while the truck was moving.  I would imagine she takes her eyes off the road 2-5 seconds many times while preforming this task.  Then later down the road I looked to my right and there was a gentleman reading the newspaper and driving.  At this point I am wondering to myself how in the world any of us make it work with all these distractions.  At the next stop sign I looked at the other three cars stopped to see what they were doing.  One car there were a couple of guys banging there heads like they were at a Metal Death concert.  Straight ahead was a lady putting on eyeliner and to the right a gentleman was lighting a pipe.  Made me kind of laugh and shake my head and then I took a look at myself and here I had my two hands up on the steering wheel typing a text message, No, No, No.

  Here I was thinking to myself about all the distracted drivers around me and I was one of the distracted drivers myself.  I guess the point to all this is we need to start paying attention to the road and less on the distractions in our on vehicles.  Here are some simple yet effective ways to be safe on the road.

• Go hands free on your cell phone (will be law next year in California).
• Don’t read while driving instead listen to the radio.
• Get up early to get your makeup on and be ready to drive to work.
• Count to three when a stop light turns green.  This will insure everyone is through the light and you won’t get t-boned.

Do you have some pointers you would like to share?

Have a great weekend and be safe on the road

JB