Media Literacy Challenge #6: “Attention budget”

The Nomadic Blog

Notes and reflections on history and education

Nate Noorlander
April 10, 2026

This post is part of The Nomadic Professor’s 2026 Media Literacy Challenge: Read Smarter Online! Twice a month throughout 2026, America’s 250th anniversary year, we’re sharing one small skill to help you read better online—social media, YouTube, podcasts, newsletters, forums, magazines, journals, newspapers, and everything between. Follow along or join and enter the drawing to win free courses or Amazon gift cards—including a grand prize of lifetime access to all Nomadic Professor courses, or a $500 Amazon gift card. Learn more here.

The only thing that is actually used or consumed in the transaction between you and some bit of information—the only thing that gets used up and has to be replaced—is the attention you gave to that information when it appeared. That time and attention are gone. If you spent five minutes composing a text, the attention you spent on that transaction is gone, it’s not renewable. If you clicked on an advertisement, or let it play longer than necessary, or stopped doing what you were doing because a thumbnail propelled you down a YouTube rabbit hole, or into a never-ending chain of hyperlinks and doomscrolling, that attention has quite literally been consumed, and you can’t get it back. It has been consumed by the information you gave it to.

Note the expression: “pay attention.” You should take this literally: The cost of taking in new information is the attention you have to pay to process that information. Like paying three dollars for a caffeinated drink, you’re paying three seconds, or three minutes, or three hours for some bit of information—an article, an ad, a video, a text message, a meme, a notification, a conversation, a book, a post.

So the question you have to ask yourself: Is it worth it? Since attention is finite—the class will end, the day will end, the year will end, life will end—is the thing you’re paying attention to worth the time you’re giving it? Especially relative to all the things you’re not giving it to, and all the things you could be giving it to?

Think of your daily attention like you think of your daily, weekly, or monthly budget. You ask yourself this question about worth all the time when you’re spending money—I can’t afford that car so I’ll get this one; that restaurant isn’t worth the money so I’ll go here instead; those clothes are overpriced so I won’t buy them; I’d rather have $5 than a snack, so I won’t go to the convenience store.

In the same way you budget dollars, you budget attention, whether that’s what you mean to do or not. And in the end you’re left with a transaction record, and we can see how much time you budgeted to doing what, and we can read between the lines to figure out what is actually important to you.

Ask yourself this question: If your attention budget were exposed to the world today, would you be confident or embarrassed?

Would it reflect the things you care about, or just the things that are easy to give your attention to because they don’t make you work very hard?

In the same way you have a finite number of dollars to spend in return for the goods you need to survive, produce things, and experience value and joy, you have a finite quantity of attention to pay for the information you need to survive, produce, and experience value and joy, and every merchant you’ve ever spent time or money with—including me—knows that you have a finite quantity of attention to give in a day, or a month, or a year, or a life, and they want you to pay your attention to them and not to their competitors, and they’ll do almost anything to get you to do it.

That “almost anything” is what we’re going to cover in the vocabulary activity that follows; each of the terms I supply will, in one way or another, define a strategy or feature of the general environment the various merchants in your life will leverage to capture your attention, defining the term “merchant” here broadly, to include everything from gas stations to grocery stores, online retailers to social media platforms, advertisers to politicians, independent journalists to legacy media outlets, from your local community all the way up to the national or international stage. Whoever wants your attention and employs the following tactics of the attention economy is an “attention merchant” for the purposes of this activity.

Understanding that your attention is finite and precious is foundational to making decisions about where to allot attention and what to ignore. It doesn’t mean you’ll never be panicked or urgent, or that there’s nothing to be panicked or urgent about, but hopefully it does mean that you can be less reactive, gullible, partisan, and vulnerable, and more selective, nuanced, confident, and even indifferent.

Media Literacy Challenge 2026 – Skill #6: “Attention budget”

Definitions

attention merchant:

a person, company, or group competing for your attention

attention harvesting:

a metaphor describing the objectives and strategies of attention merchants who gain legitimacy, funding, or some other prestige from capturing and keeping high volumes of user attention; user attention is nurtured and cultivated until the volume is high enough that it can be “harvested,” or sold

attention economy:

many platforms make money based on the number of views and clicks each ad receives, so the more time we spend on a platform, the more ads we give our attention to, the more they can convert our attention into profit

task switching:

the behavior of repeatedly shifting attention from one task to another, e.g., sending a text and waiting for a response while you get back to your homework, switching tabs to look something up, following an unrelated hyperlink, getting up to answer the door, continuing your text conversation before getting back to your assignment, forgetting where you were and revisiting all your tabs to figure it out, working on a different assignment for a while, looking something up online based on a spontaneous thought then following a few easy and pleasurable links before getting back to your work, and so on; each time your attention switches there is a cost to that switch—an obvious time cost, but also a cognitive cost, since you can’t immediately re-engage at a deep level, and potentially won’t ever get to a deep level, depending on the frequency of the interruptions, or the persistence of the intrusion of some other attention-draining potentiality, like your phone in your lap

Downloadables:

9 Responses

Camille P says:

April 13, 2026 at 4:32 pm

When I really learned to budget, I was taught that the best budgets take into account how we are currently spending, then make a unique-to-that-situation (month) PLAN for every dollar that will be spent. If any of the money in the budget doesn’t have a name/assignment, it will be wasted. When I apply this to my attention budget, I realize that in my planning, I need to put the most important things first. Right now, I would be somewhat embarrassed with the transaction record of my attention budget. I have a lot of urgent tasks that get my attention, but when it comes time to sit down and do something on my to-do-list, often there is a period of task switching that I feel I need to clear many small tasks out of my attention space before I can focus for a long and important to-do. I am setting a personal goal to be more mindful and plan out how I can use my attention so that I can be more intentional and productive with the things I prioritize with my actions.

Reply
1. Emily D. says:
  
  April 17, 2026 at 8:47 pm
  
  Camille P- I really connect with that. I too realized I would be embarrassed to review a detailed record of my time transactions, revealing how important it is to do some personal accounting and be more aware of the opportunity costs in time spending, just as I keep tabs on financial spending.
  And like money- this challenge helped me realize it’s the small change -10 minutes here and there- that could really make a difference in what I get done, as you pointed out, in addition to the big time decisions.
  And though I am tempted to reread this post and my reply multiple times to make it say exactly what I want- its probably not going to improve that much despite the additional time invested 😉
  
  Reply
Brenna says:

April 15, 2026 at 7:04 am

I really enjoyed this post. I think we all feel that media and our phones are taking up too much of our time. I have had the goal this year to do better on focusing on real connections with people.

Reply
Kelly Hutton says:

April 18, 2026 at 2:14 pm

Oh boy did this one hit home. I would be ashamed of my attention spending report. We watched an episode of “Brain Games” a long time ago and it was about “multitasking.” It was enlightening, realizing that our brain is just task switching, not multi-tasking in the way that we think it is. It really is an attention economy. I will be going over this post with my family. Thinking about attention as currency really helps, just like thinking of the money you spend on things as the time you spent earning that money.

Reply
Hyrum Petersen says:

April 19, 2026 at 1:55 pm

This is very interesting to consider…. I think a way we can take it one step further is by asking ourselves, what could I budget my time for that I WOULD be confident about(notice not what others would approve of, we shouldn’t let what others value influence what we believe and know to be right and therefore affect our decisions for the worse) and then making changes so that our budget being released to the world would be something that people could look at and go ‘Wow… I want to be like them someday’.

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Courtney Collins says:

April 22, 2026 at 12:40 pm

Equating where I put my attention to what I value is convicting to say the least. I know I am guilty of a great deal of task switching that I never intend to do but it seems to happen when an electronic device is involved. Just this morning I grabbed my phone to take a task off my notes app to-do list and I got distracted by notifications and forgot to cross off the task. How ironic! There are many overhauls to my time and attention budget that I should probably make but going back to a pen and paper to-do list might be first.

Reply
Amy Herrera says:

April 27, 2026 at 6:41 pm

I appreciate the post. The idea of a budget is helpful, and the commenter above who mentioned a plan is onto something.

I have worked on this a lot for a few years and I believe I have improved, but there’s a constant pressure to backslide. I have a widget on my phone’s home screen with my daily screentime there. I try to notice it and sometimes open it up to see what I’m spending my time on.

Reply
Wanda W. says:

April 28, 2026 at 1:49 pm

I enjoyed this assignment. I made a sort of flowchart using cutout shapes on construction paper, I took a photo with my telephone, but I can’t figure out how to get it here.

Reply
1. Nate Noorlander says:
  
  May 5, 2026 at 4:49 pm
  
  Hi Wanda! Can you email it to us? We’d love to see it—[email protected].
  
  Cheers!
  
  Reply

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