The opposite of Love is: Indifference.

Let me explain...

What do you do when you Love something. Or someone? (Let’s go for someone in this writing.)

What do you do when you Love someone?

Well… you provide to this person the 2 main resources available to you:

1. Your Time

and

2. Your Attention

Both.

Let’s say you're going for a dinner with your girlfriend tonight.

You agreed that you guys will meet at 6.30 PM just outside Liverpool Street Station on the Bishopsgate side. (For those who don’t know the area I am talking about: we’re in London.)

You’re the man so you’ve planned: “Ok we’re going to this pub first and then I have booked a table in a restaurant right in the corner for 7:30PM!”

And she says:

You think: "?!!"

If that were you, you would have allocated the whole evening with her right? Which you did! You allocate the maximum of the first resource: Time.

Let’s talk about Attention now.

Your girlfriend is staying with you but at the table she spends the entire evening her eyes on her mobile phone. Rarely looking at you and giving you some short answers like: “Okay!... Yeah that’s cool.”

Again: "?!!"

Your mobile phone would be on an airplane mode! Attention! 100% of it.

So if you think that the opposite of Love is Hate. What about Indifference? Because when you Love someone (or something or doing something) you give both. Time and Attention.

Next time you are doing something: it might be beneficial for you to ask yourself: what is the amount of time and the degree of attention (presence) I allocate to the task? 

I can also tell you about: How you do one thing is how you do everything – but that is for another article…

Cliff Celi

A little additional point I’d like to raise.

When you're doing something, if you want to increase your productivity (or efficiency) - you might like using Parkinson’s law.

(If you don’t know about it, it is an insanely good principle to apply in several areas of your life.)

The Parkinson’s law is the adage that says: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". 

With my own words: “The more Time you have to do something, the less productive / efficient you become.”

Or said the other way round: “The less Time you have, the greater your productivity and efficiency they become.”

I invite you to apply this principle to your work or to a workout or to a simple task. Reduce, on purpose, the time allocated which forces you to increase your level of attention, presence, productivity and efficiency. 

Cliff Celi