The Price You Pay When You Pay Attention

You have to pay attention to your goals if you ever want to achieve them. But while you pay for this attention with your time, there is something else you sacrifice when you decide to attend to something: everything else you could be attending to.

When we sit down and write, we are also deciding not to have a conversation, go for a walk, or eat a sandwich. We might decide to do these things later, but at that point, those decisions will be at the expense of other options.

As noted on the Farnam Street blog, we are often motivated to try and achieve too much, from maintaining relationships to advancing our career, while traveling, reading, and keeping up with current events. “Every day we are faced with choices on how to invest our time, and we all can be guilty of the same thing: Taking on too much without properly understanding the costs.”

Opportunity Costs

Every decision, every act that consumes our time, comes with tradeoffs. Despite our efforts, we can only do one thing at a time, and everything we don’t do that we might actually want to do becomes an opportunity cost — the price we pay for doing what we’re doing.

Some have speculated that these opportunity costs are behind the effort we experience when trying to focus on something. The more possibilities…