Your organisation spends millions buying its employees’ attention. The question is: what are you doing with it? Research commissioned by Dropbox found that managers lose around 3 hours a day to distraction. Microsoft’s research says the ‘most pinged’ employees can be distracted as frequently as every 2 minutes by meetings, emails and notifications.
Most organisations carefully manage how their people spend time. And they’re even more careful with money. There are budgets, approvals, expense policies and procurement processes designed to prevent employees recklessly purchasing a new pack of highlighters. Yet the same organisation will happily invite eight executives to a one-hour meeting that could have been an email. And nobody calls Finance.
That’s contradictory, because every salary is ultimately an investment in attention. You’re paying people to notice problems, make decisions, develop ideas, serve customers and direct their thinking towards things that create value. But attention is finite. Every minute directed towards one thing cannot be directed towards something else. Which means an attention problem isn’t necessarily a distraction problem. Your employees can be busy, focused and productive all day – and still spend much of their attention on things that create comparatively little value.
That attention isn’t necessarily wasted. It’s misallocated. And the cost of that misallocated attention is something I call the attention tax. Unlike most taxes, though, nobody appears to know how much they’re paying. Here are five signs your organisation might be paying too much.
1. Your priorities exceed your attention
Ask a leadership team to list its priorities and you may need a large whiteboard. The problem with that is, attention doesn’t expand every time somebody adds another strategic priority. Eventually everything becomes important, which is a surprisingly efficient way of making nothing important.
Strategy isn’t only deciding what your organisation will do. It’s deciding what deserves its limited attention – and what doesn’t. That’s why attention management is an exercise in prioritisation. And why one of the best ways to focus attention is to have less to focus on.
2. Small things get big attention
Organisations can be remarkably skilled at spending large amounts of attention on very small things. The colour of a presentation. The wording of an email. Whether partners should be invited to the Christmas party.
Meanwhile, an elephant-sized strategic problem sits quietly in the corner hoping someone eventually notices it. This tendency is called bikeshedding or Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. It describes our tendency to devote disproportionate attention to simple issues, while giving less attention to complex, consequential ones.
Why? Because complex problems require effort, involve uncertainty and introduce the uncomfortable possibility we might get them wrong. But the font on the slide deck? Everyone can have an opinion about that. So attention gravitates towards things that are easier to understand, discuss and resolve, rather than towards things that matter most.
The dangerous part is that this doesn’t look like distraction. Everyone is working. Everyone is contributing. Nobody is scrolling Instagram. But attention is still being misallocated. Your employees may be perfectly focused. But what are they focused on? Concentrating harder on the wrong thing doesn’t reduce your organisation’s attention tax. It just means you’re exhausting your attention on the wrong thing, exceptionally well.
3. You’re more reactive than productive
In many organisations, attention is allocated less by strategy than by whoever makes the latest demand for it. The email. Teams message. Calendar invitation. Phone call. And so on. “Quick question”, incidentally, is one of the great works of fiction of the modern workplace.
Without boundaries, almost anyone can reprioritise someone else’s attention. Interruptions and task switching also tax our attention beyond the interruption itself. The result is employees who know what matters most, but spend their days responding to whatever arrived most recently, looked most urgent, or made the loudest ping.
Being permanently available isn’t necessarily evidence of productivity. It may simply be evidence that their attention is constantly being scattered.
4. Your most expensive attention is doing your cheapest work
There is something Monty Python-esque about paying an executive hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and having them spend Tuesday afternoon adjusting the spacing between two boxes in PowerPoint. And it poses an important question.
How much of your most capable people’s attention is spent searching for information, processing unnecessary email, attending unnecessary meetings or producing reports nobody meaningfully uses? The work may need doing. But who should be doing it? And where could that attention better be utilised? You don’t want to be buying premium attention and allocating it to low-value activity. So when organisations ask, “Is this worth the money?”, they should also be asking “Is this worth the attention?”
5. You measure everything except attention
Organisations measure revenue, costs, engagement, net promoter score, productivity and enough other metrics to demand a meeting to discuss the dashboard. But few can answer a simpler question: Where is our employees’ attention actually going?
If 1,000 employees misallocate just 30 minutes of attention each working day, that’s roughly 120,000 hours a year directed somewhere other than where it could create greater value. At an illustrative employment cost of $75 an hour, that’s $9 million of employee time. And that may not be your biggest attention tax. The greater cost may be what all that attention could have achieved instead.
The solution isn’t telling employees to focus harder. It’s understanding where their attention is going, and designing your organisation to use it better – becoming more deliberate about priorities, meetings, communication, technology, interruptions and unnecessary work.
Leaders already understand capital allocation. They would never knowingly invest millions without asking what return they expect. Attention allocation deserves the same discipline as capital allocation. Because your organisation is already investing millions in the attention of its people. The question is: what return are you getting from it?
