Be Here Now - Mike Cohn
One of my favorite books is one I’ve never completely read. It’s called Be Here Now. A friend’s older brother was reading it when I was 10. He let me page through his copy.
The book caught my attention because it was square, an unusual shape for a book. Many of the pages inside the book were hand-lettered and illustrated.
I next came across the book when I was a college freshman. I read part of it then but never finished it because it’s a guide to Hinduism for Westerners, which isn’t my thing.
But the title of that book has always resonated with me: Be Here Now.
I think the ability to be here now is something too many of us are losing. We can’t just be in the moment and in the place. Everyone has to be constantly on their mobile phones. We multitask between what we should be working on and whatever else catches our eye, meanwhile listening for the assorted dings demanding attention.
(I admit to having paused once even while writing this to investigate the boing of a new email arriving. But I’ve so far withheld the temptation to look a second time.)
I witness the inability to be here now while training or working with teams. Once, during an in-person class, I was unable to make eye contact with any participant. Each was banging away on a laptop.
When they asked questions, they were like, “When does the sprint master help with the project backlog?”
Am I any better, though? I love music and grew up listening to the three-minute rock songs of the era. I remember listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as a teen. It was OK (don’t judge me!) but I thought, “Who has time for a one-hour song?”
Now I hit skip halfway through my favorites on Spotify.
I worry about attention spans and the ability to focus. The inability to be here now must have an impact on innovation, productivity, and teamwork. I don’t have a solution.
I don’t have ”three quick tips to be here now.” I merely want to request that we each try to be here now a bit more often, a bit longer, and a bit more intensely each day
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