The Price of Attention

Imagine if every time you gave attention to something, it ensued a cost.

How differently would you spend your time?

What if we lived in a world where the only currency was our attention. Each day you started off with a limited amount of attention and throughout the day you spent it on things that take your awareness.

Checked your phone? £5.

Looked at a billboard? £10.

Studied for an hour? £20.

With this framework, suddenly you want to save your attention for the things that actually matter. Why waste your attention on things that give no return like checking your phone when you could spend it better? Maybe on a workout or seeing your friends.

You might think this is a little silly, the world doesn’t work like this, but it sort of does. Universally we all share one currency - Time. Everyone starts the day with the same amount each day. Some of us like to invest it in sleep, exercise and healthy habits with the occasional Netflix marathon. Others may completely blow it all on pure hedonism (I’m over-generalising here).

Thinking of attention and time in terms of money spent is an excellent way to actually treat time and attention with their true value. We fear losing money more than we fear losing time, maybe that ought to be the other way around.

I’ve just reached the one-month mark of my summer holidays, 2 more months to go. For the last month, I’ve been trying to think of the best way to maximise my time off. Every academic year I start and the workload gets heavy real soon. A few weeks in and I look back on summer and think, man if only I made the most of that time off.

The issue is whenever I have time off I fall into the dolce vita lifestyle and forget that I could be doing a little more.

This summer I’ve been reading books about the mind and how we can change our ways of thinking. That’s where I came across the cost of attention. Since I read it, I’ve started to think about how I spend my attention (time) and it’s helping me make better decisions.

Maybe it can help you too.