How much is a minute of your time worth? If you’re a consultant, you probably have a good idea. If not, you may have never considered the question.

It’s not an easy question to answer. After all, it depends on who’s valuing the time. Each of us will tend to value our own time more than others, since we can’t use other people’s time to extend our lives. Until, of course, we find ourselves in a situation where someone else’s time can save us time, in which case their time becomes valuable in relation to our own. Or perhaps, in the case of a doctor, their time can extend our lives and our time, and therefore a minute of their time could be literally worth years of ours, and we’re willing to pay accordingly.

This isn’t mere angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin musing. In our information-based society, and despite coming out of a recession, our time and attention are becoming increasingly more scarce and valuable than money. After all, even those who unfortunately find themselves unemployed must wade through reams of information online to find the best, most trusted source of recommendations in order to take action and improve their financial situation. In an information-based society, knowledge precedes action. And with the pace at which that knowledge grows, and the increasing ease with which people can publish, filtering that knowledge becomes harder and harder.

All of which leads me to the concept of an attention tax. Just as we now all look at our sales receipts and income statements to gauge the extent of our financial taxation, and use strategies like registered savings plans to reduce our tax burden, so too must we start as a society paying attention to taxes on our attention. How many aspects of our societies are non-optimized for attention, even if they’re optimized for monetary value? In the private sector, for example, telemarketing may raise GDP by employing lots of people, but it decreases our GDA (“Gross Domestic Attention”) by distracting us. And cutting taxes won’t feel so good if it results in a reduced bureaucracy that increases the amount of time and attention we must spend on even the smallest task, having few experts available to help us.

So, now that financial tax season is largely behind us, maybe we can all take a bit of time to think about our attention, and what it’s worth. And for things that are distracting us, maybe we need to find some good tax strategies to minimize unnecessary expenditures.

Image credit: Dave Dugdale,  learningdslrvideo.com