How to Value Your Attention as an Entrepreneur

Attention is time, and time is currency. Attention has become the new currency because we must use our time and attention to make money. The better you utilize your attention, the more money you can earn and the more time you have to leverage. When you focus better, you manage your time more effectively. Ultimately, your attention is the most important deciding factor in your quality of life.

As an entrepreneur responsible for making hundreds of tiny decisions daily, attention management becomes critical. A person who capitalizes on good decisions moves faster than someone who gets stuck frequently.

In today's world, everyone competes for your attention, making choices harder. Between social media, email notifications, and voicemails, countless distractions pull you away from your current task.

Attention also means who and what you focus on. In reaching your goals, what you choose to focus on is extremely important.

For example, if you focus only on how looming a project is or how you'll never finish on time, you deceive yourself into producing a negative outcome. If you're realistic about deadlines and goals while seeking solutions instead of dwelling on problems, you'll be much more productive.

I choose to spend my time doing things that fit at least two of three criteria:

I need at least two of these three present to believe it's worthwhile. Otherwise, I'm wasting my time irresponsibly. I've worked on projects with people who didn't feel like a good fit from the beginning, but I continued until realizing my gut instinct was correct.

If you work for yourself, you likely don't have someone dictating your hourly tasks. Our attention translates into two types of value: rational and emotional value.

Attention in today's world is money. We use our energy (our attention) primarily through jobs, raising families, and accomplishing goals. Families and career aspirations fall under the emotional category.

In rational terms, our attention helps us do a job, which provides value, which means it costs money.

Since the Industrial Revolution, people have traded hours for dollars through employment. Even consultants or service providers create hourly rates that capitalize on the rational value of attention.

Ask yourself: how much do you want to make annually?

You can work more hours at lower rates or fewer hours at higher rates and achieve the same result. It all comes down to how you value your attention.

Do you have a $25/hour mentality or a $500/hour mentality when working with clients?

When I hired coaches at $500/hour, they delivered and over-delivered. I was amazed at the results and insights received.

As entrepreneurs, treat every job like a $500/hour position and give it the emotional attention it deserves, even when it doesn't provide rational monetary reward.

Why? It's important that emotionally, your customer or client feels invested in their success. They can then use good feelings about your work to rationalize the monetary purchase.

However, you can't focus on jobs that don't pay bills all day. Instead, value your attention like someone making $1,000/hour. Get larger projects with better-paying companies. Then leverage your time by hiring skilled virtual assistants or independent contractors.

This is the secret to making your time worth more: delegating to people with specific skill sets saves time and money long-term.

Every entrepreneur is an artist, so playing multiple roles is necessary for creative decision-making. Initially, I took courses to learn everything myself. As I became more successful, I hired designers, copywriters, assistants, and developers. It makes sense that as you grow, you do less. This is ROTI — Return On Time Invested.

Traditional ROI matters for cash flow logistics, but without tracking your time, your energy gets wasted, leading to emotional drainage and missed opportunities.

It's easy to understand attention's rational value because it correlates to money or completed objectives. However, it's hard to value our emotions. We don't create metrics helping us manage expectations of enjoying life versus reality while working on projects.

That's a key distinction anyone must make for themselves alone.

That's why creating boundaries around your attention is so difficult and important. You don't need to take every meeting or work with people in terrible moods who actively drain you.

All of these are subjective, of course. How you value your criteria depends on your own passions and interests.

As you spend your time wisely, you'll notice yourself getting closer to your goals. Conversely, when you spend time on draining or tedious projects, you'll feel depleted, tired, and searching for meaning behind your work.

If you're interested in food and health, find clients in that space. Naturally, the more you research something, think about it, and take action on it, the more paths you'll see toward creating it.

I attracted celebrity nutritionist Kimberly Snyder through my own curiosity. Around 2011, before it was popular to be vegan and eat turmeric, people thought I was weird for ordering quinoa or drinking green smoothies. Today, the opposite is true. I feel better physically and emotionally because I learned self-care from a world-class nutritionist while working on projects I was passionate about.

I also wanted bigger clients because smaller ones took the same time but paid much less. I did some work with Timothy Sykes, who became successful teaching people smarter investing.

This was incredible because it let me tackle issues I'd encountered with Kimberly. Kimberly was a successful celebrity nutritionist but wasn't well-known herself until after we built her brand. However, Timothy didn't have a solid online presence and was looking for help building a bigger brand platform.

This meant I could have the emotional value of repeating my success with Kimberly. My attention went toward something I was good at, had succeeded with before, and could bring to a new client who needed it.

Eager to work together, he partnered with me to build the education division for his brand in his target niche — Realtors.

I helped create educational content, programs, and online courses he could market to help Realtors break into the luxury market. I also helped him create a service for agents to build stunning websites and establish their own brands.

Helping Realtors change their lives and their families' lives is highly rewarding and gave me an emotional return on my attention investment.

I believe helping realtors do better jobs directly helps homeowners. A home transaction involves over 200 purchases within the first year, so we directly influence the economy and make home buying and selling easier for everyday people. This is how you use emotional value to feel rewarded in your work.

If your attention is both rational and emotional, what does that mean exactly?

Your attention can propel you rapidly through your work day or drag while your to-do list piles up.

Your emotions actually impact your rational value directly. When both work together, you see the best results — meaning you're rewarded financially and fulfilled emotionally.

Leveraged attention results from taking advantage of psychological hacks, reframing your environment, and leveraging your mental perception to achieve your desired outcome.

However, when you really want impact, figure out how to make your attention have bigger impact.

When working for $500/hour, that hour significantly impacts your finances. When working for $50/hour, you're not leveraging your time as well as you could. Most of the time this isn't your fault — it simply comes down to not leveraging your time well enough to provide needed rational value.

But what if you work for a nonprofit, and the work is extraordinarily rewarding? In this case, you're actually making more than someone earning more but enjoying their time less. This is one way to balance lower earning potential — by doing work you care about more.

When you find the sweet spot of your passions and use them to make money, you've essentially won the lottery. Every hour invested earns you emotional and financial currency exchange. Your attention reaches its fullest potential, and you'll likely be happier as a result.

When you leverage your time, you leverage your attention and make the most of your ability to feel happier and become wealthier.

I learned about a concept of time that organized how we focus attention based on two approaches: monochronic and polychronic.

The monochronic system focuses on doing one singular task at a time, aligning with rational attention value. Under monochronic time organization, cultures focus on accomplishing one task at once. The end goal matters most. Monochronic societies don't place much value on interpersonal relations unless they help complete tasks faster. Western cultures predominantly follow monochronic systems.

Its opposite is polychronic, focusing on teamwork, flexible schedules, and simultaneous happenings. This is for multitaskers and aligns with emotional time value. It's primarily found in Eastern societies. It's very people-oriented and fluctuates as individual tasks change and flow with daily feelings.

The best approach to maximize attention is performing optimally under both scenarios. If you focus on a single task, you're more likely completing it. When efficient and effective, you navigate smoothly between multiple tasks. Project changes, client hurdles, and other inputs can derail your schedule, making managing multiple projects, people, and open-ended deadlines difficult.

Over the past decade, social media grabbed us and isn't letting go. It captures our attention and, whether we admit it or not, it works. Social media generates buzz about business, lost pets, and world affairs. It also makes getting feedback and spreading the word about your art extremely easy.

Where else can you network with thousands of people in one place?

Every time you post on social media, you're getting seconds of your followers' attention. Is your content worth their attention?

Researchers estimate the average person will spend over five years of their lives on social media. That sounds like a lot, but consider how quickly you look up restaurant reviews, check blogs about movie sequels, or download podcasts about new diets.

Becoming a successful entrepreneur means stopping thinking about attention as micromanaging every detail and starting to act congruently with who you are and what you need to do to become who you want to be. Social media helps direct your attention toward outreach connecting you with people worldwide.

Every time someone checks your website or YouTube channel, you're getting their attention. The best part is they can watch, read, or listen to your material without you being present.

A phone call or business meeting takes time — which is attention. But when you have evergreen content online, it stays there for night owls, foreign fans, and early birds alike.

This means leveraging social media is a great trade for your ROTI. You trade some attention creating content and have potential for thousands reading it while your attention focuses on other things.

Working online and creating digital products is the greatest way generating passive income. Passive income is the fastest way to truly raise your attention's value. Imagine if your income weren't tied to hours worked. What if you could work really hard building great products or producing amazing content, then work just a handful of hours afterwards?

Successful entrepreneurs know using social media's power is one of the best ways generating wealth with lasting impact on your ability to have more free time by creating passive income.

Even without active social media presence or many followers, you can create awesome content. Great content gets large followings. Many people think they need hundreds of thousands to realize online dreams. In reality, many successful people did it with just a few hundred. Once they proved their information was high-quality and their products got results for customers, they grew their brands and created the followings we all seek.

Remember: quality matters more than quantity. Get started today!

Make the most of your attention by focusing on big-ticket items moving the ball forward in rational value. But don't forget your emotional state. If a project moves you, work on it. If it bores you, maybe pass. Your emotional reward influences dopamine levels and your ability to focus and feel good about your accomplishments, so don't underestimate finding work you truly enjoy.

When balancing emotional and rational attention values, create content as blog articles, videos, podcasts, and social media posts that work for your brand while you sleep.

Make the most of your business by making the most of your time and attention.