SDS 488: The Price of Your Attention

(00:19):
Time really is money. When I was a child, I often thought this idea of time being money was nonsense. The longer I stretch into my working years, however, the more clearly obvious it is to me that it’s true. Time is money. Every second of your life that ticks away is yours to use as you see fit and one of the options you have at your disposal is to generate income with it.

(00:42):
There are myriad ways you can convert time into money. One of the most straightforward is to get paid at an hourly wage. A bit more abstractly, you can invest time in creating a product and then later sell that product. As a data specialist, the latter option can be particularly compelling. If you invest your time in creating a data model or a software product, in the computing age we live in, it can be disseminated around the world via the Internet, impact a large number of people, and generate a very high rate of financial return on the time you invested.

(01:20):
Since your time can be so terrifically valuable, we can make the most of it by carefully protecting our mental attention from distractions. In episodes 434 and 436, I provided tools that we can use to hone our attentional capabilities through a deliberate, regular, and mindful meditation practice.

(01:40):
In today’s episode, I’d like to point out that we can also simply buy more time. For example, if you have some repetitive task that you carry out most days, is there a way that you can automate it on your computer? For my Mac, I opted to purchase an inexpensive piece of software called Keyboard Maestro that allows me to easily program hot keys to perform repetitive tasks for me such as pasting the URL to my Zoom room in a Slack message, email, or calendar invite.

(02:11):
For more complex tasks that can’t be fully automated, could you hire a part-time contractor to train up and take some of it off your hands, thereby freeing up more of your own time for other work?

(02:25):
You can look for opportunities to save time across countless aspects of your life. Considering how valuable your time can be, it’s remarkable how cheaply you can buy some extra focus. From this lens, for example, it’s almost always worth purchasing the $2 ad-free version of that mobile-phone application you regularly use. Every time an ad is displayed on the screen, it is consuming your valuable attention whether you’re consciously aware of it or not.

(02:54):
As a second example, instead of reading free news sources, it is often only a dollar or two per day to have a subscription to an extremely high-quality news source like The Economist, which offers in-depth, balanced, data-filled articles on topics you can take meaningful action from.

(03:11):
All right. Well, that’s it for today’s episode. Thanks for investing some of your valuable time listening to me. I hope you get a great return on the investment and I’m looking forward to another round of SuperDataScience with you very soon.