Do you ever wonder how many hours you have a day? Yes, you guessed it, 24 hours. But did you know? If you take away your daily ~7 hours of sleep, and your 8 hours of school, you are left with approximately 9 hours of your day? This 9 hour is what you are left with after you finish school, which is what you have in your “Attention Economy”. Attention Economy is a measuring system for your daily spendings on time and attention. It can basically help you manage how you spend your time, energy and attention though out your day, month, year, or even life. It is a great way/approach if you are trying to keep track of your time.

For the sake of argument, hypothetically, you use 2 hours of your time that you have for other after school activities that your parents signed you up for. After the 2 hour activity, you are tried and decided to spend another 1 hour online “to take a break”. But little did you know, you actually spent 3~4 hours online because you lost track of time. So after the 5~6 hour of whatever you were doing, you are left with about 3 hours of your day to finish your homework which you just remembered to do.

This has been the main problem that was happening among most teen-agers. But we never seemed to have a actual solution. The main 2 problems that we can see from that example is that first, the need to keep tract of time when we are online, and second, the need to manage your time when you want to go or going online.

When I am thinking about keeping tract of time, a clock or a alarm is always the first thing that comes into my mind. When we are online, we might think that we have already set a time limit on when we want to stop, but most of the times, we just simply forget to check the time. So one solution is that we could find or set a clock, alarm, or anything that could remind you the time that you have set for you plan.

Speaking of setting plans, organizing your time when you’re online is also very crucial for your “attention economy”. Just like spending your allowance, plan out how you will use your 9 hours of day. The plan don’t really need to be very complicated, it could just be a small checklist of what you want accomplish in this 9 hours of time. For example: 2 hours of homework time, 1 hour of online activities, 2 hours of after school activities… The plan is only there for you to know what you need to accomplish in the time you have instead of just going online without knowing when to stop.

Furthermore, here’s another scenario. After you had the plan and have set the alarm to remind you when to start and stop, you begin to work. But suddenly, you a red, eye-catching WeChat notification popped up. The conspicuous bright red light is just so irresistible that you had to click into it, and then… This scenarios happens all the time, research has shown, online companies intentionally designed the notification signs as red and eye catching. The solution to this is simple and doable, anyone could do it and will immediately succeed. Are you ready? The solution is, turning the notifications off!

In conclusion, “Attention Economy” is the time you spend online, outside or in life. Its basically how you spend your attention every day, month and year. The solution is also very simple, just literally organize your time wisely and use any solution you feel comfortable and effective with.