Attention Economics
When we think of precious resources, we usually start with time, water, or hard metals. Through the ages, these and others have been the most common ones, but in the modern era, we need to add in another — our attention. Pre-internet, billboards, magazine and newspaper ads, and commercials consumed our attention, but with the introduction of the internet, we’ve all experienced an explosion of irresistible distraction. The distraction is not unintentional, but rather strategic. And even though the war for our attention is now common knowledge, we have yet to develop the tools to manage our attention without significant effort.
There are many ways to tackle the beast of attention management — from life hacks to time management apps, but in this article instead of listing how to manage your time, I will compare how attention allocation is similar to resource management. Ultimately, I’ll introduce you to a framework that will help you allocate attention to it’s most productive use based on your personal goals.
Attention Is Scarce
One of the basic premises of resource allocation is that resources are scarce. In the briefest possible definition, scarcity means that the thing you want or have is limited. Being that you can’t feasibly pay attention to everything in the world, your attention falls can be classified as a scarce resource. With scarcity, we have to begin doing something very familiar to us, make some choices. When making choices, you are usually weighing options, but simultaneously, you are maximizing for some outcome. For our purposes, let’s call it satisfaction.
In totality what this means is:
- Your attention is scarce
- Being that it’s scarce, you must be wise with what you attend to and what you don’t
- As you make decisions, you will optimize for what’s most important to you, for example, satisfaction
Framing attention allocation in this way helps you in the next step of applying value to the satisfaction you receive. Satisfaction is only an example, but making decisions based upon something important to you will make it easier to make the right choices when getting there.
Attention Requires Sacrifice
When making choices, and seeking some maximization, you, unfortunately, need to make sacrifices. In economic terms, this is called making trade-offs and measuring opportunity costs. When making trade-offs, you’re substituting one activity for another, assuming that what you’re foregoing has a lower opportunity cost.
In the context of attention, it means that you are attending to one thing because the alternative has a lower cost and ignoring it isn’t a big deal. With the amount of distraction in our world, we usually make trade-offs and measure opportunity costs subconsciously. Consider the following example:
Think about the last time you came home from a hard day at work — You were likely exhausted and just plopped down to watch some hard-earned television. Though likely not a big deal in reality, in comparison to the alternatives, it may have been costly. And though Netflix is satisfying at the moment, you are sacrificing some goal at the moment to cater to your exhaustion (assuming you have some goals). By making this decision, you’re not optimizing for satisfaction in the long-term and only meeting a need in the short-term.
The challenge through this process is that every time we need to make a decision, we don’t have the mental tools to quickly measure alternatives. As a solution, we can apply another economic concept to improve our decision-making when making choices — return on investment, or for this context, return on attention (ROA).
Attention Alternatives
ROI a common metric used in the financial field to measure how much return one can expect after investing a specific sum. Amongst other metrics, money managers use this metric to compare investments in different institutions. When managing one’s attention, you can roughly apply the same principle by qualitatively inferring satisfaction. Though satisfaction or attention can’t be quantified, you can use a matrix to place any single activity in a quadrant that will help you make conscious decisions about how to get the highest satisfaction with the lowest attention. This may sound lazy, but by placing activities in their rightful places, you’ll see how you can take some small steps that require little attention to get where you want.
For example, consider the matrix below:
In this case, we are trying to minimize our time spent, while maximizing satisfaction. For you, satisfaction might be a different goal, but ultimately, placing activities in this framework can help in situating alternatives in the right place.
Conclusion
At first, measuring your attention like this is tedious. It won’t feel natural. Many would argue that minimizing attention is minimizing effort. But, in reality, you’re just trying to manage your attention in such a way as to increase whatever you find valuable. Use the matrix as you see fit and try to remain in the two right quadrants to get where you want. You’ll have to spend some attention in constructing and making it a habit, but it will be well worth it.
