Attention is Now a Currency. Do You Have an Attention Budget?

Just as technology’s evolution of payments and e-commerce disrupted our wallets and spending habits (i.e. paying for things with the tap of a button on our phones), the evolution of information technology is disrupting our time and attention habits. Age-old money management principles like budgeting, investing, and saving have helped some of us (and our bank accounts) weather the rise of consumerism. However, I can’t help but wonder whether or not we’ve been adequately prepared to manage our attention as innovations of the information age look to capture and monetize every idle second of our time. With today’s largest corporations ushering in the dominance of the advertising model and offering their products to consumers seemingly for free, it feels like our attention has become a currency in exchange for the product. So I wonder: do you have an attention budget?

In the last few decades, the speed and ease with which information can be shared and accessed worldwide has increased exponentially. As the pace of this innovation only continues to accelerate, we’re exposed to orders of magnitude more information than we were exposed to even 25 years ago. We have the world’s answers at our fingertips, a continuous stream of communication with nearly every person we’ve ever met, and even access to the opinions of strangers we’ll probably never meet. These technologies, and many others like them, present us with a firehose of information in the form of likes, tweets, videos, and more as they all compete for perhaps our scarcest resource: our attention.

Most of us (maybe not billionaires like Jeff Bezos) consider money to be a finite, precious resource. As such, we allocate a lot of time and effort to making sure we use the money we have wisely. Our parents advise us to budget it, to save it, to invest it, and to spend it on the important things, not on things that don’t matter. Some of the best personal finance advice is widely available in the form of blogs, books, and even school courses. It’s safe to say that we humans really value our money. What about our time? For all of us (even Jeff Bezos), time is objectively a finite resource. Once it elapses, there is no getting it back, and we definitely can’t get more of it (yet?). So why isn’t a skill as obviously important as attention management given as much importance as money management in today’s world? Why do so many of us scroll endlessly through infinite feeds of memes, politically charged rants, ads, and other meaningless content when we could put our time to better use? As information technology continues to permeate every facet of our lives and captures an even greater share of our time, I think it’s more important than ever to take control of our attention.

What will it take to do so? Maybe we need to actually treat our attention like a currency and strictly manage it with a budget. After all, that’s how today’s largest corporations view it, although they probably don’t value it as much as we do. Take Facebook as an example. They assess their quarterly performance as a business in the form of engagement (daily/monthly active users, time spent in the app, etc.), because that engagement translates into revenue through advertisements shown to users in the app. What’s more, they actively engineer their app to be more and more engaging so users spend an increasing amount of time using it. Most recently, Facebook reported an Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) of $7.05 [1]. In 2018, it was reported that the average Facebook user spent about 58 minutes per day using the app [2]. After a little math, that means Facebook values every hour you spend using their app at roughly $7.30. I don’t know about you, but I value an hour of my own time a bit more than that.

While I don’t argue the many benefits we’ve enjoyed as a result of recent innovations in information technology, I do think we need to adjust our mental model of how to engage with these new platforms. We can’t trust the corporations who build them to have our best interests in mind, so we need to make better decisions for ourselves. Let’s use these technologies as what they are: a means to an end, and nothing more. If attention really is the new currency, take control of your own attention budget, and invest as much of it as you can in your own happiness and success. Spend more time with family and friends. Take on hobbies you’re passionate about. Learn new skills that make you an even more valuable part of society. Oh, and don’t forget to balance it all out by sharing a few dank memes with friends on IG.

[1] - Facebook Q2 2020 Form 10-Q

[2] - People spend almost as much time on Instagram as they do on Facebook