Control
Reflections on the shifts of 2020 and how a year of disruption rewired our collective understanding of attention.
The word “control” used to belong to a small vocabulary of work: project plans, risk registers, the mild administrative violence of the Monday meeting. In 2020 it was rented out by the rest of life.
Attention as an economy
What we noticed first was attention — that we had less of it, and that what we had was being spent without our consent. The boundary between work and not-work disappeared, and with it the implicit understanding that focus was something you owned.
The slow return
The return has been slow and uneven. Some habits stuck; some did not. The quiet finding of the year is that control is less about the calendar and more about which voice you let speak first in the morning.