scattered notes on attention as a finite resource and what follows from taking that seriously.
time management frameworks are popular because they treat time as the scarce resource. but time isn't really scarce. there are 16 waking hours in a day, and most people aren't efficiently using even half of them. what's scarce is attention. that's the ability to fully engage with one thing at a time.
i can "spend" eight hours at my desk. if my attention is fragmented across slack, email, code, and a lingering worry about something personal, i might get ninety minutes of real work done. the time was present. the attention wasn't.
implications for product design
if attention is the real currency, then every notification is a withdrawal. every interruption is a tax. products that respect attention should be designed to minimize the number of times they pull someone out of whatever they were doing.
the best tool is the one you forget you're using. the worst tool is the one that reminds you it exists every fifteen minutes.
implications for life
i've started auditing my attention the way some people audit their finances. not "where did my time go?" but "where was my attention?" the answers are often uncomfortable. i'll discover that i spent three hours "working" but my attention was really on a social media argument i'd read that morning.
protecting attention turns out to be more valuable than managing time. do not disturb mode, closing unnecessary tabs, batching communication into specific windows. these aren't productivity hacks. they're attention investments.
status: early draft. this wants to become something longer about the attention economy but i'm not sure it needs to be more than a note. revisiting.