5 Tips to Expertly Allocate Attention to Your Goals

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The knowledge economy is giving way to the attention allocation economy, where your managerial skills for deciding what to give your attention will determine your success. Here are five strategies to help you allocate your attention more effectively.

1. Shift Between Player and Coach Modes

A fundamental principle of allocating your attention wisely is to alternate between coach and player modes.

AI tools can facilitate self-coaching conversations. Ask your favorite chatbot to ask you 15 questions, one at a time, about any of the following:

• "Help me identify important goals I give zero attention in an average week."
• "Help me identify attention I give where the juice isn't worth the squeeze."
• "Help me explore alternative mindsets I could borrow that might change my perspective on how I allocate my attention — for example, a scientist testing hypotheses, an investor managing a portfolio of time, or a storyteller shaping a compelling narrative."
• "Help me identify goals that feel impressive but aren’t meaningful — if a goal is more about looking good to others than deeply mattering to me, it might not be worth my attention."
• "Help me increase the extent to which my attention is driven by curiosity rather than obligation."

2. Identify Inflection Points

The benefits we get from giving our attention aren’t linear. There are often clear inflection points. For example, an hour a week of strength training is almost undoubtedly the best use of a single hour in your week for your long-term health span. Based on the science, your first hour of strength training is also an order of magnitude more valuable than your tenth hour, or even your third or fifth.

In many arenas, especially related to self-regulation, our work lives, and learning, the biggest benefits occur when we go from no focus to some. This contrasts with typical advice to limit our focus to just a few priorities at a time, which can sometimes cause us to overlook easy wins or fail to collect those wins because we think we need to do more.

3. Consider Occasional Two-Week Blocks of Short-Term Obsession

A lot of self-help advice tells us we should start taking particular actions now and continue them forever. That's not realistic. Short-term obsessions, where we gain basic knowledge and skills in an area, can be very beneficial.

Consider areas of your life where two weeks of devoting any spare attention to a particular focus could result in considerable long-term payoffs. For example:

• Learning about nutrition science and using tools (such as the Cronometer app) to check for missing nutrients in your typical diet.
• Learning about effective strength training to plan time-efficient workouts that build muscle and prevent sarcopenia.
• Learning strategies for saving money on groceries, for example, by watching couponing YouTube channels.
• Gaining a deeper and more intuitive understanding of a concept important to your work role (e.g., statistics for researchers) by revisiting the basics.

While short-term obsessions help you acquire new skills efficiently, you'll also need to break free from conventional thinking patterns about where your attention should go.

4. Use Thought Experiments to Break Anchors

How we allocate our attention can become overly anchored to what we currently do, social norms, and popular productivity advice. Use thought experiments to break those anchors. Consider radically different ways you might allocate your attention.

Some possible thought experiments to try:

• Adopt the Retired Visionary Mindset. You’ve already achieved legendary status in your company or industry for your productivity and past accomplishments. What would you focus on next if your role was to see and say what others don't and resolve ambiguity about the most important directions to move forward?
• How would you allocate 10 hours of hyper-focused attention? What would a wiser, more experienced version of yourself, apply 10 hours of attention to?
• Consider the Challenge of Fragmented Focus. How would your approach to a goal shift if you could only work on it in brief, fragmented bursts of under 10 minutes?

This brings us to our final point:

5. Make Progress With Only Fragmented Attention

What if you could never allocate sustained attention to a goal — only fragmented bursts of 2 to 10 minutes? How would you still make progress on your projects in this scenario?

Imagining this constraint is more than just a thought exercise. If we only set ourselves up to make progress when we have sustained, focused attention, we're limiting ourselves.

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One strategy I use is to ask AI, in voice mode, to generate a list of 15 to 25 diverse ideas for the next step in a task. Later, during another moment of brief downtime, I read its answer.

Since AI bots store conversations in this format, they naturally track progress, making it easy to pick up where you left off. This is one of the most overlooked benefits of AI — it helps keep projects moving forward even when your attention is fragmented.

Ideally, your workflow and tools should allow for effortless context shifting, enabling you to re-enter a thought process without cognitive overload.

Another underrated application of this approach: Fragmented attention strategies are particularly useful for exploring moonshot ideas. You can dedicate small bursts of attention to big, creative ideas that don’t require linear thinking.

Mastering Your Mental Resources

In the attention allocation economy, success isn't determined by how much you know but by how wisely you direct your focus. The five strategies outlined here give you practical ways to become a better manager of your most valuable resource — your attention.