Your personal resources: the attention economy

Turn on the television, open a newspaper or a magazine, and the leading story will likely be about the state of our economy. It’s on everyone’s mind, and for good reason, but I learned of a new type of economy recently, and its one that’s all too frequently overlooked.

The “attention economy” deals in two of our most valuable and limited resources: our own time and attention. Herb Simon, a Nobel prize winning economist, explained “in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes.”

With scarcity comes value. Take, for instance, 30 seconds of your attention during the 2009 Super Bowl. The market value for that commodity? $3 million dollars.

So how are we safe-guarding these precious resources in our day to day lives? If we were in the jewelry business, we might hire a burly security guard to deter theft from our stores. If we imported tile, we’d insure our cargo against damage on the overseas trip. But in comparison to these standard business practices, we take little precautions against the losses of our own time and attention.

Want to plug a big leak fast? Try this in Outlook:

• Using the “Tools” pulldown menu, select “Options”
• On the “Preferences” tab click the box titled “Email-options”
• Select “Advanced email-options”
• Uncheck all boxes under the section titled “When new items arrive in my inbox”

Going through these steps will stop the alarms and icons that flash every time you get a new email message. The attention you lose through checking your inbox on a per email basis, as opposed to once or twice an hour (or less!), is probably more then you realize. What started as a helpful notifier may be impractical given the escalating volume of email received on a daily basis.

Where are your other leaks? Are you holding weekly department meetings out of habit rather then out of necessity? Is the time you spend reading industry publications helping grow your professional knowledge or do you need to reassess your subscriptions? If we start thinking critically about time and attention like the valuable resources that they are, we can apply business savvy to our most important enterprise: ourselves.