Is Your Attention Proactive or Reactive?

We assume we’d spend attention like we’d spend currency. Thoughtfully. But we don’t. We waste vast amounts of attention reactionarily. That thing beeps and we look.

For the sake of argument, let’s think of attention as currency and your daily allowance is 1,000 units. No carry-over. You can spend it or ‘pay attention’ in two ways: proactively or reactively.

Spending it deliberately, proactively—to achieve goals—is a constructive and beneficial way to spend it. It involves consciously focusing on what deserves your attention. It creates progress, momentum, excitement. Yes, it consumes resources but you control it and have something to show for it in the end.

Conversely, spending it on what just attracts your attention, reactively is uneconomical and imprudent. This is the essence of distraction. Every time we get a notification and leave what we’re doing to check it, we let something else spend our attention for us. But even though someone else started it, you reacted to it costing you one unit of currency.

Another reactionary expenditure of attention is worry. It accomplishes little, if anything, and acts like a hole in your pocket for currency to fall out. If you find yourself worrying, you can choose to take action and do something. But ,to let the worry just eat your attention, squanders some of the 1,000 units.

The other harm of giving in to distraction is interruption of momentum. Once you’ve been distracted, it takes a measurable amount of effort to get back to where you were before you checked the distraction and interrupted the momentum. More waste.

At the end of the day, how will you wish you had spent your attention?