“The ability to focus attention on important things is a defining characteristic of intelligence.”
Robert J. Shiller
I’m going to make three bets. The first one: at least once in your life you’ve come across the expression “time is money”.
The odds of the second one are a little less favourable, but I’m going to bet that you’ve also been exposed, to some degree, to the opinion movement according to which time is a much more valuable resource than money. I should clarify that “movement” is quite an overstatement. There is no organisation, at least not to my knowledge, that is actively pushing an agenda aimed at increasing general awareness on the true value of time. As to wether I agree with either of the concepts of time being money or time being more valuable than money, the answer is a resounding “YES, BOTH”. Counterintuitively, I think both statements are valid and I have plenty of reasons to support my thesis, although I will not propound them in the current article.
Money, Time and Attention
My last bet is the one closing in on a 100% certainty: you’ve never heard equating attention with wealth. Of course you haven’t, because I have concocted it. Attention is the lesser known, but perhaps a tad more important, consumable resources available to you and anyone else – yours truly included, of course – during our allotted time on this planet. There are three, in total, and each of them deserves very close scrutiny. It could help to consider this metaphor: imagine these three resources are three siblings working in the show business, like the Kardashians sisters (although they’re five), the Baldwins (there’s four of them), the Wayans (four again), or the Arquettes (bingo).
Money is the most famous of the three, with feet firmly planted on stardom and omnipresent in magazines and all sorts of media. Time is considerably less famous, but a little more talented, and on its way to notoriety due to increasing exposure to general viewership. Attention is almost absent from digital and printed media, sports a very limited filmography, but is more talented than the other two combined. The purpose of this analogy is to illustrate that money consistently receives a disproportionate amount of credit as the most important thing in human life, and quite possibly the majority of world population openly or privately shares this view.
Our subjective experience of money
Thanks to a significant number of clear-sighted authors, operating mostly in the self-help branch of the literary world and through blogs and magazines, there’s a trend unfolding in the public opinion that time is more important than money. This is generally explained with the simple fact that money can be made, transferred, grown, and lost. In other worlds, the quantity of money varies depending on several factors, both on the individual and global level, and we can consider it a partially finite resource.
Alright, I know, “partially finite” sounds bizarre, at best. Let me elaborate: how much money you and I have in our bank accounts, or stuffed under the mattress, depends on a series of choices we made, and how we perceive it depends on psychological aspects. In other worlds, we can have have a lot or little, and we can have conflicting emotions and an impaired perception about it. We can have a belief system that, on one side of the spectrum, makes us feel like we can make as much money as we want, or not a cent more than our salary. At the same time, the quantity of money in the system depends on aggregate factors beyond our control. All of this makes it effectively impossible to consider money an entirely finite resource.
The tyranny of time
Time is a different beast. Unless you somehow have the chance to explore the quirky side of General Relativity, your supply of time is limited to 24 hours a day like every other person on this planet. You cannot stretch it, grow it, transfer it to someone else. You can simply allocate it. The aspect most relevant to the discussion at hand is how we allocate time relatively to money. Exchanging units of time for a set amount of units of money is what the overwhelming majority of the population does and, unfortunately, most of the times not a correct formula for wealth. This linear relation between the two resources engenders a wide variety of negative feelings and emotions, because one is forced to allocate most of the waking hours to a job, and, unless that job provides a powerful sense of purpose and enjoyment, she/he is left with very little time for things that satisfy such needs.
Why Attention is invaluable
I’m hardly the first person to bring the injurious side of a linear exchange of time for money to your attention. Here, though, is where my view slightly differs from the general consensus. I believe most people who are aware of this fact are partially oblivious to another: exchanging time for a fixed amount of money is still a productive way of using it, whereas squandering your attention on futile things is a far less sensible allocation of a finite, and perhaps even more precious, resource.
Humankind has always been interested in understanding itself, but before the Scientific Method came along, it was always an empirical game of guessing that got some facts right and many wrong, often with disastrous results. After observable facts became more important than subjective opinion, so to speak, and proper technological tools became available, researchers started peeking inside one of most incredible mysteries in the universe, the human brain, and thanks to the related branch of endlessly fascinating disciplines, neuro-cognitive sciences, we now know a lot more about it. We know that, for instance, our organs of perception are capable of taking in a lot more information than we are conscious of, and that even the part that our consciousness deals with on a daily basis is simply too much. A brain is expensive biological machinery, and Evolution had to devise – of course I’m taking a poetic license in assigning it personhood and intention – a function to filter out unnecessary input, and thereby preserving precious processing power. Voilà! Attention was born.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7177153/
This paper from the U.S. National Library of Medicine gives a great overview of the subject from the perspective of neuroscience. Attention is defined as the ability to flexibly control limited computational resources. It is governed both by conscious and subconscious mechanisms, but since processing power is limited, then we can infer that attention is limited. We choose what to focus on, but it is exceedingly easy to expend it on useless things that absorb it thanks to mechanisms we have little control of. It is indeed so valuable that a whole subset of Economics and Information Science, Attention economy, was created to study it, and the inherent approach is to treat it as a scarce commodity.
Everyone’s competing for your attention
Do you ever stop to consider how many different things are competing for your attention at the same time? It may sound like a pointless exercise, but I really do think very few people are conscious of the war raging at all time to capture a tiny fraction of our brain’s processing power. It’s not just smartphones, although most of the time they make up the bulk of the input, though “noise” would better describe it, that our heads are forced to process. It’s colleagues, visual signs on the roads, vexing auditory alerts in our cars, our kids yelling and fighting and calling us for anything they deem urgent – hint: EVERYTHING AND ANYTHING – computers, the radio, television, landline telephones, noises in the street, bodily functions and any form of temporary or ongoing pain, our own memory systems bringing constantly alerting us of unfinished chores and unfulfilled dreams, desires and projects. And YES, those constant alerts and notifications on our phones. People writing on chat rooms, reminders, emails notifying us of new products on our favourite marketplace, and in general anyone trying to sell us anything.
I suppose you might be thinking I’m not exactly as neutral as Switzerland in this ferocious competition. I produce content that is delivered through several platforms, therefore if you stumbled upon this article and website, it’s because I won a few seconds, or minutes, of your high-priced neuronal computation. In my defence, I never said that all input is negative, or that you should live in a sensory-deprivation chamber for the rest of your life. What I want to say to you is that, if you want be monetary wealth, there is no escaping meaningful work towards creating value for other people. Meaningful work requires massive amounts of focus, which is time and attention combined for a specific purpose. If you want True Wealth, which is the satisfaction of a variety of needs in a hierarchy from basic to highly complex, you’ll need to invest undivided attention on relationships, your community, your health, the health of your loved ones, your spirituality, your artistic expressions, and many other things that contribute to giving you a sense of meaning and purpose and belonging.
Be Ruthless in Protecting Your Attention
I think by now you have begun to develop awareness on this subject, or at least you feel the need to investigate further. If that is the case, I am grateful and happy, because I deeply believe that anyone can benefit from a clearer view of how precious our attention is. That’s the reason why an ancient practice, mindfulness, is becoming increasingly popular all over the world. Unfortunately, many teachers make it a more complicated thing than it needs to be, and don’t succeed in making it approachable for the masses. Allow me to give you my two cents: Mindfulness is, at its very core, ATTENTION TRAINING. It is a lifelong practice to teach our brains how to ignore the useless stuff, and being present at all time, in a state of relaxed alertness. I have practiced mindfulness for a long time, and I consider it an invaluable tool in preserving our attention. Besides, more and more scientific findings are highlighting its benefits on our health. Unfortunately, I’m afraid mindfulness is not enough in winning the war.
Tom Davenport’s book is an excellent resource to dive deeper into why businesses all over the world are vying for your attention. It treats it and defines it as currency, and I absolutely agree with him. I tend to use the term resource more often because it stresses its intrinsic scarcity more than the fact that it can be exchanged. Nevertheless, in a world where cognitive overload is a serious problem, and the massive amounts of data and content produced every day is only going to increase, here at Value is King we believe that, the same way money management and time management are important, there is a desperate need for education regarding ATTENTION MANAGEMENT.
Not only does attention play an essential in our general wealth and wellbeing, given how much stress our bodies produce through cognitive overload and the compelling evidence on smartphones’ notifications being able to change our neural structure and creating addiction, but it is of the utmost importance in our pursuit of wealth. Since Value is King is all about effective wealth education, we invite you to stay tuned for more content on the subject of Attention Management, and to subscribe to our Youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5lNh0NNEaU2eVCjxURVF6w
Remember: be ruthless in protecting your attention!