What Follows · Notes Toward a Theory of Attention

If attention is conserved and its returns diminish, a few practical consequences follow that are worth stating outright.

The first is about information, not attention itself. A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention (Simon, 1971): every new feed, notification, and tab is a claim on a fixed budget, and the claims now vastly outnumber what the budget can honour. Figure 1 shows the shape of the problem — the supply line is flat while the demand for it climbs without limit.

Figure 1. Attention supply is fixed while demands on it rise without bound.

The second consequence is about design. Table 1 gathers a few interventions and what each one does to the budget. Note that they are not equivalent: some add supply at the margin, others simply reduce the number of claims.

Table 1. A few interventions and how each acts on the attention budget.

Intervention	Acts on	Effect
Batching alike work	The price	Fewer costly context switches
Removing a feed	The demand	One fewer standing claim on the budget
A single daily plan	The allocation	Equalises marginal return across tasks

The third consequence is personal, and the model from the previous chapter already implies it: because the optimum is neither monomania nor scatter, a good day is one that holds a small number of tasks at the point where their marginal returns are roughly equal — and then, crucially, defends that arrangement against the day's standing tide of claims.

None of this is a productivity system. It is closer to a constraint: spend the one budget you cannot grow as though you could not grow it.

References

Simon, H. A. (1971). Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World. In M. Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest (pp. 37–72). Johns Hopkins Press.