Cognitive Opportunity Costs

I clearly remember picking up old aluminum cans from the side of the road in order to earn a few extra pennies.

I knew that I could pick up 24 cans and sell one pound of aluminum to a scrap metal place near my family’s home, and that pound paid just about the cover price of one comic book, depending on the current price of scrap aluminum in the mid 80s.

The cans were easy enough to find in the suburbs, but there were only a few stray cans in the entire neighborhood, and an ambitious kid like me might find at most twenty cans on a very good day. Side note: this would be a very bad day for the neighborhood itself, just not for us scavengers.

This meant going out onto the busy, dangerous roads where all the good litter was.

This sort of hustle for pennies made a great deal of sense for me as a kid. If I worked harder, I could have a better quality of life (or, at least, I could have more of the things I wanted).

Now, here’s a good question to ask: why did I stop picking up stray aluminum cans from the side of the highway? After all, they still bring in a couple of cents per can, and I’m probably a LOT better at picking up cans now than when I was a kid, crouching down notwithstanding.

It’s not so much that I don’t need money today, nor is it that I have a steady source of income nowadays. If I could press a button and continue collecting those cans today, I would. Unfortunately, there is a serious cost to continuing my young life’s work.

That cost? Attention, mainly. You could also say time, and I think that’s fine—but I want to talk about attention today.

It isn’t that the marginal income is no longer valuable. It’s more like this:

You only get so much attention in a day, so spend it wisely.

You might already be familiar with the term opportunity cost. This term, common in finance and investing, reminds you that even if someone is offering you a good deal, you might have a better deal available somewhere else. Since you can only invest in a certain amount of things at a given time, you have these important trade-offs to consider.

Every little bit of attention you spend on that means fewer bits of attention spent on this. Is that really better than this, though?

This is your cognitive opportunity cost.

Instead of asking whether a thing makes money, you need to ask whether it’s worth taking up the space in your head. If you have a can’t-lose investment idea but I already have two better ones lined up, I’m not taking yours unless I have the spare cash. Likewise, I’m not going to turn my focus toward a new project unless it’s better than something else I’m paying attention to.

It might be helpful to draw an analogy between your money and your attention. You get a certain amount of money each month, so you might need to create a budget. Similarly, it might be useful to think of the amount of attention you can pay on a given day or week as finite.

You need an attention budget, basically.

Say no to things that don’t matter if you find yourself not paying attention to the things that really matter. What something costs in terms of dollars matters, but what it costs in terms of attention may well matter even more.

Think carefully about what you think about.