The silent thief: How your attention is being stolen, and what it’s costing you
If you ask most business leaders what their most precious resource is, they’ll say time or money. Both answers are wrong. The most valuable commodity you possess—far more valuable than capital or hours—is attention.
Money can be earned back. Time can be optimized, delegated or better structured. But attention, once fragmented, weakened or trained in the wrong direction, silently erodes your ability to think clearly, lead decisively and execute long-term strategy.
And here is the uncomfortable truth: there are entire multibillion-dollar industries, largely concentrated in Silicon Valley and replicated around the globe, whose sole purpose is to capture, monetize and hijack your attention.
This is not an accident. It is not incidental. It is not “just entertainment.” It is engineered.
The global attention economy
Social media platforms, content feeds, notification systems, recommendation engines and mobile applications are not neutral tools. They are precision-designed systems, built by some of the smartest behavioral scientists, engineers and data analysts on the planet. Their business model is simple: The longer you stay, the more valuable you become.
Every swipe, scroll, click, pause or microreaction feeds an algorithm that learns how to keep you engaged just a little longer. Not informed. Not fulfilled. Engaged. This is why you don’t just see content—you see perfectly calibrated content. Content that triggers outrage. Content that triggers curiosity. Content that triggers fear. Content that triggers validation. And most leaders underestimate this because they believe they are “too rational” or “too disciplined” to be affected. They are wrong.
The smartphone: The most efficient attention-sucking device ever created
Jeff Bezos has said this, and it is true. No device in human history has absorbed more attention than the smartphone.
It sits in your pocket. It sits on your desk. It sits next to your bed. It vibrates. It lights up. It interrupts. And because it looks productive—emails, messages, news, updates—it creates the illusion of usefulness while quietly destroying depth. I’ve seen this play out countless times in boardrooms and leadership meetings around the world.
One client stands out vividly. He would come into every meeting with two phones placed directly in front of him on the desk. Not hidden. Not silent. Face-up. Notifications on. During strategic discussions, he would glance down constantly—sometimes every 30 seconds. He believed he was multitasking. Master of all trades. Hotshot CEO.
In reality, he was missing half of every conversation. He heard fragments. He absorbed partial context. He reacted instead of thinking. And over time, the quality of his decisions declined—not because he wasn’t intelligent, but because his attention was permanently fractured. Multiply this behavior over weeks, months and years, and the cost becomes enormous.
You train the same brain everywhere
Every outcome in your business can be traced back to attention. Strategy requires attention. Execution requires attention. Leadership requires attention. Culture requires attention. Relationships require attention. Every moment you spend distracted is a moment you are not fully present where it matters most. And here’s the deeper, far more dangerous layer that most leaders completely miss.
The brain you use to build your business is the same brain you use when scrolling through social media feeds, jumping between apps, checking notifications and consuming short-form content.
There is no separate “business brain” and “leisure brain.” This is a critical misunderstanding. When you train your brain for short bursts of stimulation, constant novelty and rapid context switching, you are conditioning it to lose patience quickly; seek immediate feedback; avoid discomfort and; abandon effort when progress is slow.
And then leaders wonder why long-term projects feel exhausting; strategic thinking feels harder than it used to; teams lose resilience during tough phases and; execution weakens under pressure.
This is not a coincidence. You are training your attention span—daily.
Short attention creates short-term leadership
Businesses are not built through quick dopamine hits. They are built through long periods of sustained focus, often with delayed gratification, uncertainty and discomfort.
When leaders unknowingly train themselves to be short-term focused, they also become more prone to: abandoning initiatives too early. Jumping from strategy to strategy. Overreacting to short-term noise. Losing emotional stamina during crises. This is especially dangerous during hard times.
When markets turn. When execution gets messy. When progress slows. When pressure mounts.
Leaders with weakened attention are far more likely to give up, pivot prematurely or distract themselves instead of staying the course. They don’t fail because of a lack of intelligence. They fail because they lack attention endurance.
One of the most common lies leaders tell themselves is: “It’s just social media. It doesn’t affect my work.” This is categorically false. The brain does not compartmentalize attention training. You cannot spend hours per day fragmenting your focus and then expect to effortlessly switch into deep, sustained strategic thinking. Your brain does what you train it to do. And most leaders are unintentionally training it to be restless, impatient and reactive.
Your four to score
At the highest levels of leadership, protecting attention is not a luxury—it is a duty. Just as you protect capital, talent and reputation, you must actively protect your attention. That requires deliberate, sometimes uncomfortable decisions.
1. Ruthless control of devices. Phones do not belong face-up in strategic meetings. Notifications do not belong during deep work. Attention should not be negotiable. If you allow devices to control you, they will.
2. Sacred blocks of deep focus. Every serious leader needs uninterrupted time—not “free time,” but protected thinking time. No emails. No messages. No meetings. No interruptions. This is where strategy lives.
3. Clear personal rules. High-performing leaders operate by rules, not willpower. Phones out of bedrooms. Phones out of meetings. Phones off during thinking blocks. Rules remove decision fatigue.
4. Cultural signaling. Your behavior sets the tone. If you check your phone constantly, your team learns that attention doesn’t matter. If you protect focus, they will too. Culture follows attention.
Attention is the foundation beneath everything you do. Lose it, and everything else weakens. Protect it, and you protect the very core of your leadership.
Tom Oliver, a “global management guru” (Bloomberg), is the chair of The Tom Oliver Group, the trusted advisor and counselor to many of the world’s most influential family businesses, medium-sized enterprises, market leaders and global conglomerates. For more information and inquiries: TomOliverGroup.com or email Tom.Oliver@inquirer.com.ph.
