100 Attention Points
That's all we get
If you and I had a dollar for every time we’d been fed the mainstream line, “Time is our most precious resource”, then we’d be able to quit our day jobs.
Ah, but recall that we’re some curious contrarians. So we’ve got to question this commonly held belief.
It seems like a sensible nugget but there’s one glaring problem.
It’s wrong.
Attention is our most precious resource. And it’s time we start treating it with the proper respect it deserves.
The second our alarm goes off, we sling our arm across the bed to press snooze, and our attention countdown has officially begun.
What the heck is an attention countdown?
It’s an invisible ticker floating above our heads that beeps like the clock from the show 24. From 100 to 0 each day.
That’s right. You and I get 100 attention points each day. How we choose to spend them is a solid indicator for how our lives turn out.
We all get the same amount of attention points just like we get the same 24 hours in a day. The only difference is that time stays constant. Attention does not. Which can be good or bad.
Let’s go through a fictional example to drive this home.
Airman (no relation to the author) wakes up to the sun beaming through his windows on a lazy Sunday morning. All natural. No alarm clock. How nature intended. With his attention meter fully replenished.
But he unconsciously grabs his phone laying beside his head and the trouble begins.
He starts scrolling through his favorite apps — TikTok, Instagram, email, and iMessage. Which does an excellent job of filling his head with a nasty combination of death, drama, and destruction while also draining his attention ticker. All before his toes have touched the ground.
Poof. There goes 24 attention points.
No worries. He’s still got 76 points left.
So he pops next door to his favorite local coffee shop — Bean Water. Where he orders his iced latte with oat milk. He proceeds to take that first sip which normally leads to an instant rush of dopamine from the top of his head down to his toes.
Not today. Something’s off. He’s guzzled this latte hundreds of times so he knows the exact combination of ingredients down to the drop.
The anger nearly bursts a blood vessel in his forehead. You don’t want to get between Airman and his latte. So he storms up to the counter to give the barista a piece of his mind. All due to a few missing drops of oat milk.
Poof. There goes another 26 attention points.
Now he’s only got 50 points left for the rest of the day. And it’s only 10 o’clock.
See where I’m going with this?
It’s impossible to live a life worth living if we spend our attention points on the nonessential.
The tyranny of modern life comes from the infinite distractions and bundles of minor inconveniences that suck away our precious attention. Because we allow them to. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Remember, we only get 100 attention points a day. Do we really want to waste them on the nonessential?
It’s really quite simple to reserve our attention points for what matters, but it certainly isn’t easy.
We have to be intentional with how we spend our attention points even more so then how we spend our money. Plenty of us are frugal with our money, but when it comes to our attention we squander it on the trivialities of life. Let’s be stingy with our attention.
We have finite attention in a world of infinite distraction.
So what’s the important stuff that is worth spending our attention points on?
That’s for you to determine. But I can get you started with a few things that definitely DON’T belong in the important pile:
Doom scrolling through social media for an hour while still laying in bed in the morning.
Watching the talking heads on the three letter networks talk about literally anything. That latest breaking news story has little (more like zero) impact on you.
Screaming at the cars around you while stuck in traffic. In my extensive tests, that has never made it go away.
What else comes to mind? I’ll let your imagination take it from here.
I say this more as a reminder to myself than as a prescription for you.
It’s still far too easy for me to fall into the trap of wasting my attention points on the nonessential gunk that clogs the pipes of my mind.
I trick myself into thinking I’ll just watch the Atlanta Braves highlights real quick. Next thing I know, I’m neck deep in the Youtube comments arguing with little avatars about who should be starting in left field instead of Marcel Ozuna.
Harmless, right?
No.
I just frittered away a dozen attention points on the nonessential.
Ever been there?
I find it helpful to take a step back before reacting impulsively on my animalistic tendencies and ask:
How many attention points will this cost me?
Do I have the luxury to spare those on this?
98 times out of 100 the answers are respectively, “Too many” and “Hell no”.
So let’s remember that invisible attention ticker floating above our heads the next time we are about to react without first thinking, “Is this how I want to spend a chunk of my 100 attention points today?”
Don’t be like Airman.
Likes and comments below.
This is so well-written, fun, useful, simple and brilliant Arman. 100 attention points to spend throughout the day—spend them wisely! And your examples (of some other person of course) are so on-point. Though I'd like to suggest that the attention realm can be hacked beyond its linear and finite frame. What if it's possible that you can actually GAIN back attention points you may have lost in your day, simply by helping other humans to orient their own attention toward worthwhile things—as you have done with this post. Now, I'm going to share your essay in Notes so more people can make use of its exceptional value, and as it gets shared, we all retrieve our attention like a divine multi-level pyramid scheme, where everyone is enriched and there are no losers at the bottom of the pyramid. Attention compounding in value as we share. May everyone share what matters today and protect the precious nature of our collective attention.
...anywhere we can go to level up and gain more attention points?...