Attention is the real balance sheet. Most companies know where the money went. Few can say where the attention went. Yet that’s what decides everything. Every company budgets for headcount and spend. Almost none budget for attention. It feels infinite, so we scatter it across meetings, dashboards, and inboxes until nothing truly moves. The hours that were supposed to drive the future dissolve into maintenance, coordination, and noise. Then everyone wonders why strategy drifts, why the same conversations repeat, and why belief lags behind information. The answer sits in plain sight. Nobody manages attention with the same rigor as capital. Attention is finite. Every meeting, every message, every decision pulls from the same pool. When it’s spent without intention, it becomes debt. You see it when leaders stop noticing what’s actually happening inside the product, when they outsource conviction to metrics, when they treat progress reports as proof of progress. Information travels faster than belief. The distance between them is how much attention the company has misplaced. The fix is simple, but it isn’t easy. Treat attention like capital. Track where it really goes. Pull the calendars of your leadership team and look, line by line, at the hours. Most of it will be maintenance, some will be growth, almost none will be learning. That spreadsheet will tell you more about your company’s future than any dashboard. It will show you what you’ve chosen to care about and what you’ve chosen to ignore. Reallocate it the same way you reallocate budget. Pick one loop that grows the business and one that teaches you something new. Fund both with time, not talk. Ten focused hours a week will do more than a hundred scattered ones. Publish it so everyone can see it. Call it the attention budget. Review it weekly. That single act will force alignment, because what you measure with time is what people start to believe matters. Return on attention is real. You can feel it when a team moves from status meetings to decision reviews, when conversations start closing loops instead of opening new ones, when people begin to see their calendars as a reflection of the company’s priorities. Money keeps the lights on. Attention decides whether the lights ever find the truth. Every founder hits the point where growth slows and the dashboard fills with noise. The instinct is to hire or spend. The smarter move is to ask a quieter question. Where did our attention go? Because that’s where the business went. The company is never doing one thing and thinking another. It’s doing whatever the leaders choose to look at. If you can’t show where attention went, you didn’t manage the business.