“Paying” Attention

So now that you know systems are built to leverage your time, and now that you know the information is there so that you can get it when you choose, and now that there’s a context, how do you decide where to pay attention?

 

What is attention? The new currency is not information; it’s free and everywhere. It’s not hardware, or software, or applications, or bandwidth, because those things are getting cheaper every day. It is your attention, because every time you choose to look at something, read something, contribute to something, you are taking out of your attention bank account. How do you decide to “pay” attention?  Everything is competing for your cycle, so how do you decide which things you want to look at? You want not just information, but meaning with value, and it has to be valuable enough for you to pay out of your attention bank account to deal with it.

 

We’ve talked about information content as well as context, and content plus context adds up to relevance.  The higher the relevance, the higher the value, and the more attention you’ll pay out of your attention bank account. To decide, you have to also factor in the element of time to relevance, and that affects the value. You may get some information at one in the afternoon that has no current relevance, but if at 1:15 something dramatically changes in your business or home, all of a sudden that may now be the most important thing.

 

It’s very important, also, to be able to find and recall all that valuable information, because if you can’t recall it immediately and lay your hands on it, that time spent searching is wasted time and attention, and if your most valuable asset is attention, then you’re burning cycles to no benefit.  So what are the parameters that constitute relevance to you?