Attention — the resource every AJTBD mechanism routes through

The AJTBD canon names attention in many places under many local names. Cognitive cost is one of six cost dimensions in Value Creation §8. Consideration Set is the operational output of Consideration Activators in State A (Consideration Activators §8). Orientation Jobs are the verb cluster — understand · find · choose · figure out · compare — that updates that set (Job Types and Properties §6). Trigger is the event that initiates an action toward a Job (Job Structure). The Aha Moment is the Positive Prediction Error the brain notices during chain execution (Value Creation §12). Direct customer attention to where you need it is an explicit foundational mechanic.

Every one of those concepts is a projection of the same underlying object into a different problem domain. Attention is the resource the customer's brain refuses to spend except where it predicts a return. Managing where, when, and on what the brain spends attention is the upstream operation every AJTBD effect runs through — value detection, behavior change, communication, activation, retention. Naming attention as a single object lets the practitioner see the AJTBD mechanism stack from one lens instead of six.

This page covers attention as it operates inside the AJTBD mechanisms — the customer-side view. The company-side view lives at the meta-framework level in Focus & Attention Management. That view covers focus discipline at segment and Job levels, the Innovator's Dilemma, sustained focus over time, and employee attention to their work.

1. Attention is a metabolic resource the brain rations — a methodological extension of allostasis

Under the allostatic-regulation framework, the brain is an energy-budget investor (Sterling 2012; Barrett, Quigley & Hamilton 2016; canon usage in Scientific Foundations §1). Glucose, oxygen, salt, dopamine, serotonin — all are budgeted in advance of need. AJTBD treats attention as one more line in that budget, and as the behaviorally-observable expression of how the brain is spending it. Where the brain spends attention, it spends glucose, working memory, and dopamine the next moment. Where it refuses to spend attention, no downstream perception, decision, or action follows.

This is a methodological extension, not a directly-cited finding. The allostasis literature documents the metabolic-budget mechanism for the body's homeostatic resources. AJTBD extends the budget framing to attention as a separately-trackable line item. Attention is one of the most product-relevant cost dimensions the customer's brain pays, and every value-creation mechanic in the catalog implicitly operates on it. The extension is consistent with allostasis. It is not stated in the cited works in these words.

This thesis is the substrate for every section below. The brain runs a continuous prediction about whether spending attention here will return more value than it costs. If the prediction is negative, attention is withheld — and no objective value the product carries reaches the customer.

2. Attention has three operational forms — each one is its own management problem

Attention is three structurally distinct phenomena that everyday vocabulary conflates. Naming the three lets the practitioner pick the right mechanic for the right form.

• Attention to a Job — pre-existing awareness that a Job and a way of performing it exist for me. This is the Consideration Set in State A, the output of every act of Consideration Activators the customer has ever encountered (Consideration Activators §8). When a customer reaches for Wealthfront instead of Chase savings, attention to robo-advised portfolios as a category, and to Wealthfront as a named product, was loaded into their head long before the choice moment.
• Attention during a Job — the customer's continuous attentional spend while walking a Critical Chain of Jobs. These are the chain-walk dynamics of Critical Chain of Jobs §5 and §7.4: per-step predictions, per-step Aha Moments and Problems, interruptions, drop-offs, mid-flight Solution switches. Activation-and-retention work lives here.
• Attention captured by external triggers — what wins the brain's attention in unstructured time the customer didn't pre-allocate. The scroll feed, the notification, the billboard the commuter sees, the YouTube preroll, the "someone is typing" dot on Slack. Capture is the mechanic of every product that competes inside an attention-economy surface.

The three forms compose into the full attentional life of a customer. A customer with no attention to the category cannot start a Job. A customer who started cannot finish without attention during. A customer in unstructured time becomes acquisition surface for whichever attention-capturer is competing for their next minute.

Diagnose the form before picking the mechanic. A team trying to fix a chain-walk drop-off with more brand ads is mis-routing. A team trying to load Consideration Activators for an unfamiliar category through banner retargeting is mis-routing the other direction. Banners capture but rarely carry the bandwidth to load Job Graphs. Mechanics for attention-to: Consideration Activators, content marketing, peer stories, named-product-and-entry-path messaging. Mechanics for attention-during: front-load the Aha, reduce time-gaps, kill cycles, save state, remove negative-emotion micro-steps. Mechanics for attention-captured: trigger associations, viral Jobs, presence in the customer's Critical Chain of Jobs.

3. Attention spend is the most underweighted cost dimension — and removing it produces the largest disproportionate value-signal

Value Creation §8 names six cost dimensions: money, time, effort, cognitive load, negative emotions, Tax Jobs. Cognitive load is the dimension product teams most consistently underweight. The team designing the product has already paid the cognitive cost of understanding it once, and stops noticing the cost in subsequent interactions. The customer has not. Every screen, decision, option, alert, configuration, comparison, and naming convention is a fresh attentional spend the customer's brain accepts or refuses.

The substrate is the predict-and-compare engine of Value Creation §4 running over attention costs. The brain predicts the attentional spend the next interaction will require, compares it to what actually arrives, and registers the delta. A product that asks for less attention than predicted produces a Positive Prediction Error of the attention-cost dimension. The brain registers value at roughly ~2× the strength of an equivalent additive feature, per the negativity-bias asymmetry of Value Creation §7 and Scientific Foundations §13. Attention returned is felt harder than equivalent value added.

Four high-leverage canon mechanics route through attention removal directly:

• Lower cognitive cost (Value Creation §8 — cognitive load). ChatGPT replaced the writer's attentional burden of holding structure-and-content in working memory. Mint dashboard replaced "add up all my transactions to know if I'm over." Booking pre-filtering removed "compare 40 listings."
• Kill a Job (Value Creation §14.2, Subtraction §1). AirPods returned the attention spent on untangling. Face ID returned the attention spent on password recall. Apple Pay returned the attention spent on reaching for the wallet.
• Move up a level (Value Creation §14.1). Squarespace returned the attention previously spent across find a developer · brief the build · review iterations · buy hosting · manage plugins · renew SSL. ChatGPT returned the attention spent across find template · format headings · draft from blank · restructure later for first drafts.
• Eliminate a negative emotion (the Remove negative emotions mechanic — Value-Creation Mechanics). Anxiety is itself an attentional spend, because the brain returns to the worry loop repeatedly. Removing it returns attention to whatever the customer wanted to spend it on. Square's tip screen removed the anxious loop "what's the right amount with the barista watching." TurboTax's accuracy guarantee removed the loop "will the IRS catch this?"

Audit the product for attention spends the customer didn't ask for. Configuration screens that asked four questions when one default would have done. Preference panels with eight axes. Multi-step onboarding that requires choosing between options the customer has no basis to choose between. Each is an unpaid attention extraction, and removing it usually outperforms adding a feature on the same engineering budget.

4. Loading Consideration Activators is the foundational attention-management operation at the segment level — and the only entry point for unfamiliar categories

Consideration Activators names Consideration Activators as the knowledge that led a person to perform a specific Job with a specific Solution. The deeper move is that Consideration Activators routes the customer's attention to the existence of a new Job Graph for performing their Big Job. The five Consideration Activators components are five attentional payloads:

1. Component 1 routes attention to the existence of a new Job Graph for performing the Big Job.
2. Component 2 routes attention to the value delta — measured at the Big Job's success criteria, the level where motivation lives.
3. Component 3 routes attention to a named product and a concrete first step — the door the customer can act through.
4. Component 4 routes attention away from the specific fears about the new Job Graph — the customer's predictions that the Big Job won't be performed well through our graph — that would otherwise block movement.
5. Component 5 routes attention away from the competing Job Graph by surfacing its concrete Problems and Risks.

Without Consideration Activators loaded, the customer never spends attention on the alternative Job Graph at all. Class 2 behavior change (Behaviour Change §10) is then impossible.

Consideration Activators loading is a large component of Customer Acquisition Cost, especially for Class-2 launches, but not its only component. CAC measures the cost to drive the customer through to the target action (signup, paid conversion). Consideration Activators loading delivers awareness and intent. The cost of converting a Consideration Activators-loaded prospect into a paying customer sits on top: registration friction, payment friction, fear-residual reduction at the point of action, conversion-optimization work. For unfamiliar-category launches the Consideration Activators component often dominates CAC. For familiar categories the conversion component does. The structural insight is that for Class-2, the team that underbudgets Consideration Activators loading underbudgets the dominant CAC line, and the launch fails before conversion work can save it.

For Class-2 customers, land all five Consideration Activators components before any direct-acquisition spend. The five are the Job Graph, the value delta at Big-Job criteria, the named product with a first step, specific fear reduction, and the competing Job Graph fired. Missing any component leaves attention to the new category uninstalled, and acquisition spend lands on prospects whose brains will not yet evaluate the offer. For Class-1 customers (familiar category), components 1–3 plus a sharp criteria delta are typically sufficient. Pragmatist sub-segments inside Class-1 still need all five.

5. The receptivity window — attention to new Solutions opens at specific triggers, not uniformly across time

Customer attention to new Solutions opens at specific moments and closes between them. The canon names seven of these triggers in Behaviour Change §8: a Critical Chain of Jobs break in the current Solution; accumulated Problems exceeding a threshold; a life event or context shift; a status or identity shift; an external shock or forced switch; new external Consideration Activators that wakes up an Orientation Job; a first-hand trial that produced a strong Aha Moment.

All seven are attention-opening events. Outside them, the customer's attention is locked into habit physiology (DLS-network-dominant control; see Scientific Foundations §15) and steady-state Job Graph execution. Marketing aimed at habit-state attention mostly burns budget.

Operational consequences:

• Map the calendar of predictable trigger windows in the target segment. Tax season, fiscal year-end, layoff cycles, new-role onboarding, post-merger integration, regulatory deadlines, planned moves, school start. Time Consideration Activators delivery to these windows. Cost-per-acquired-customer drops dramatically when attention is already open.
• Detect chain-breaks in customer behavior as acquisition signals. G2 reviews complaining about competitor X, sales-call recordings where the prospect describes a recent failure, support-ticket transcripts showing repeated Tax Jobs — each is a customer whose attention has just opened. The window closes within days-to-weeks (Critical Chain of Jobs §6), so deliver Consideration Activators fast.

6. The Aha Moment is the brain's first attentional capture of value — engineer it as far left in the chain as possible

The Aha Moment is the Positive Prediction Error the customer experiences against the success criteria they came in with (Value Creation §12). Reframed through attention: the Aha is the moment the customer's brain spends attention on the product and detects that the attention is being repaid above prediction. That detection is the teaching signal that re-trains the brain to spend attention on this Job Graph again.

The leftward-positioning discipline (Value Creation §12: "position the Aha as far leftward in the customer's critical chain of jobs as possible") is, in attentional vocabulary, minimize the attentional debt the customer has to extend before the first repayment lands. Every Job before the Aha is attention spent on the product without yet receiving the Aha Moment. Every additional pre-Aha Job is a place where attention can be withdrawn by interruption, habit, or competitor Consideration Activators (Critical Chain of Jobs §7.4 — external interruptions during the chain-walk).

Concrete Aha placements that compress pre-Aha attention spend:

• Dropbox rebuilt onboarding to deliver the file-sync Aha inside the first session. Pre-Aha attention spend: download app, log in, drop one file.
• Stripe Checkout delivers the test-payment-clears Aha in 10 minutes from signup. Pre-Aha attention spend: paste 9 lines of code.
• ChatGPT delivers the first-draft Aha in seconds. Pre-Aha attention spend: type one prompt.
• Slack delivers the team-chat Aha on the first sent-and-replied message. Pre-Aha attention spend: invite one teammate, send one message.

Audit every onboarding step against one question: is this step the Aha, or attention debt before the Aha? If it's attention debt, ask whether it can be deferred until after the Aha. Collect the credit card later, configure preferences later, invite the team later.

7. Attention guidance through the Critical Chain of Jobs is a continuous discipline — not a one-shot act

Attention management is a discipline applied at every transition in the Critical Chain of Jobs. Every step in the customer's chain-walk is an attention-direction decision the team is making, explicitly or by default. Which signal does the product surface next, which option does the customer see, which decision is asked of them, which information is shown versus hidden, which next action is proposed. The team that treats attention-management as a one-shot move — capture at the ad, then leave the rest to UX best-practice — leaves attention undirected at every subsequent transition. Competitors, interruptions, and habit fill the vacuum.

The principle compounds with §6 (Aha placement) and §8 (interruption resilience). The Aha sets the first attentional repayment, interruption-resilience defends against attention loss, and continuous guidance routes attention forward through every chain step in between. Attention guidance, Aha placement, and interruption resilience are the three operations that compose chain-walk completion, and skipping any one drops completion rate proportionally.

Concrete patterns of continuous attention guidance the canon already names:

• Lower the start-cost of the Next Job in the chain. At every transition between Jobs, the product proposes the next Job in pre-shaped form. Stripe Dashboard surfaces "Send invoice to this customer?" at the moment a customer is created. Cursor's next-edit prediction proposes the next code change before the developer articulates it. Apple Maps surfaces "Leave by 4:12 PM" at calendar-meeting time. Spotify Daily Mix queues the next session shaped by the previous one. Each is attention guidance at the boundary between Jobs.
• Surface one action at each step, not many. Multiple options at the same level diffuse attention. One proposed action concentrates it. The "Next →" button, the default action, the Recommended for you card — each is a continuous-guidance instrument.
• Pre-resolve the setup of the Next Job at the moment the previous one completes. Amazon 1-Click pre-resolves shipping and payment for every Next Job. Robinhood recurring buys auto-fire next week's purchase at the moment of this week's. iCloud auto-backup runs the next backup overnight without human action. Attention is conserved across every transition because no fresh decision is asked for.
• Visual hierarchy is continuous attention prioritization made physical. Type size, weight, color contrast, position — each directs the eye through the page in a sequence that decides what the customer notices and what they skip. Every screen is an attention-guidance artifact.

Map every transition between Micro Jobs and ask where the customer's attention should land, and what the proposed Next Action is. If the answer is "wherever the customer happens to look," the transition is undirected, and chain-walks leak there.

8. The Critical Chain of Jobs walk is a sequence of attention transitions — most drop-off is interruption, not rejection

Critical Chain of Jobs §5 and §7.4 name the sources of interruption during chain-walking. From inside the chain (§5): chain-break and mid-flight Problem. From outside (§7.4): external interruption, criteria change, and a competitor surfacing mid-walk. Through the attention lens, each interruption is a moment when the customer's attention is pulled off the current Solution's chain and onto something else. The single most consequential finding (§7.4): "Most one-step abandonment is interruption, not rejection."

The dominant interruption source is rarely the obvious one. A customer who didn't complete the signup flow usually didn't reject the product. A notification fired, a kid called, the page took 30 seconds and they switched tabs. The chain is competing with every other claim on attention in the customer's environment at that moment. Attention is shared with the customer's full life context, not allocated exclusively to the product.

Three attention-management moves the canon names (Critical Chain of Jobs §7.4):

• Save state aggressively across interruptions. Every step that requires the customer to rebuild context on resume is a place where interruption permanently terminates the walk. Wealthfront's resume-where-you-left-off, Stripe's persistent dashboard state, Notion's auto-save — each treats interruption as the default and continuity as the value.
• Time the chain to low-interrupt windows. Wealthfront's under-5-minute onboarding, Stripe's afternoon-integration promise, banks sending refinance offers on weekend mornings — short chains in low-interrupt windows complete more often than long chains in high-interrupt windows. Attention competing with fewer external claims has a lower probability of being captured.
• Defend against mid-flight Consideration Activators from a competitor, the hardest interruption. A customer hearing about a competitor while in the middle of using you has both the comparison fresh and the friction of your chain fresh. The defense is to deliver the Aha early enough that the State-B emotion has already started to install. The new Job Graph has begun absorbing attention into a pattern that competing Consideration Activators has to displace.

The diagnostic for drop-off is "What could have interrupted them here?" asked before "Why didn't they like this step?" The first question is right about 80% of the time.

9. Move-to-Previous-Job is attention capture upstream of the competitive set

The canon names Move to the Previous Job in the chain as one of the directional strategic moves (Critical Chain of Jobs §9, Job Graph §19). The deeper move: whoever performs the Previous Job in the customer's Critical Chain of Jobs captures the customer's attention before the comparison-shopping Job fires, and shapes the Consideration Set the customer brings into evaluation.

US examples where Previous-Job capture is the dominant acquisition mechanic:

• Google Flights and Kayak capture "figure out where and when to fly" — the Previous Job before "buy a ticket." By the time the customer reaches a specific airline's site, the comparison has happened on the aggregator's terms.
• SmartAsset and NerdWallet capture "figure out how to plan my retirement" — the Previous Job before "choose an advisor or robo-advisor."
• Mortgage calculators capture "estimate my home-buying budget" — the Previous Job before "apply for a mortgage."
• The Wirecutter captures "figure out which product is best" — the Previous Job before the actual purchase, across hundreds of categories.

Google's whole business model rides this mechanic. Search ads sit precisely at the Orientation Job "figure out what to buy" — the Previous Job before "buy." The advertiser pays Google to be the first option the customer's attention lands on when the Orientation Job fires.

Previous-Job presence is durable infrastructure, not a campaign. Calculators, comparison tables, decision trees, free guides, SEO content — each compounds across years as attention-capture infrastructure at the Orientation stage. Ad spend at the buying stage is a renewable cost. Previous-Job content is a fixed-cost asset.

10. The main attention-capture mechanics — five canonical moves

Across products and advertising surfaces, five moves recur as the way attention gets captured at scale. Each operates at a different point in the customer's attentional life and uses a different opening.

• Capture at the Orientation Job. The customer's attention has already opened to evaluate options, and they are searching, comparing, asking peers. The product pays, or builds infrastructure, to be the first option encountered. Google search ads at "figure out what to buy"; The Wirecutter at "which is the best [product]"; SmartAsset at "how should I plan my retirement"; mortgage calculators at "how much house can I afford." The §9 mechanic (Move to the Previous Job) is the strategic form of this capture.
• Capture at the trigger association. Link the product to a recurring trigger in the customer's life so that when the trigger fires, the product is what they reach for without re-evaluating. Coca-Cola at meals; Dunkin' and Starbucks at the morning commute; Google as "first place I go when I have a question"; Notion as "first place I open when I start a new project."
• Capture at the chain-break. The customer's current Solution has just failed, and attention has opened to find a replacement. Insurance ads after weather disasters; financial-services ads after layoff cycles; outbound sales emails timed to a competitor's outage; G2-review-monitoring routed into outreach. The §5 receptivity window is what makes this capture possible. The window is short (days-to-weeks), so speed wins.
• Capture through environmental context. Attention the customer was already spending on the environment gets repurposed. Out-of-home billboards along commute routes; in-store endcaps; sponsored content inside news sites; IKEA's showroom route walking through finished room arrangements; SaaS demo zones at industry conferences. Environmental Consideration Activators (Behaviour Change §5, IKEA case) is the substrate.
• Capture through viral Jobs. One customer's performance of a Viral Job exposes the product to many others' attention as a side effect (Job Types and Properties §9). LinkedIn's "I'm thrilled to share" posts; Strava's segment leaderboards; Notion's "Powered by Notion" footer on shared docs; Figma's design-review-with-stakeholders pattern; Calendly's scheduling link.

Pick the capture move by where the target segment's attention actually opens. A B2B product with a long Orientation cycle wins on Orientation-Job presence (calculators, comparison content). A consumer product with strong recurring triggers wins on trigger-association (decades-long brand investment). A product entering a category where current Solutions break wins on chain-break monitoring. Misrouting wastes spend.

11. Communication is attentional engineering — landing pages, one-liners, and visuals are all attention-routing artifacts

Communication names communication as "the transmission of already-created value to a target segment." Through the attention lens: every communication artifact is an attention-routing instrument. It decides what the customer's brain looks at first, then second, then third, before the brain's attention budget is exhausted and the visit ends.

Five canon principles read as attention-engineering rules when reframed:

• The one-liner enters the customer's brain before attention collapses (Communication §5, explicit in the source). The formula [What it is] + [Core Jobs the product performs] + [value by criteria] is dense because attention budget is short. Stripe — "online payments for businesses of every size"; Notion — "the all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases"; Linear — "the issue tracking tool you'll enjoy using."
• Features are proof, not the message (Communication §4). Features demand attention to translate them into the customer's Job Graph. Jobs reward attention by speaking the customer's existing language. Feature-first messaging asks for unpaid attentional work. Job-first messaging spends the customer's attention on the value, not on the translation.
• Visuals show State B, not the production process (Communication §6). DoorDash shows dinner on the table, not route logistics. Peloton shows the completed workout ritual, not the bike hardware. State B captures attention because it activates the Big Job's emotional payoff.
• The landing page is a short Critical Chain of Jobs (Communication §8). The visitor arrives with a trigger, partial Consideration Activators, a prediction, fears, and limited attention. The page moves them through recognition, value prediction, proof, fear reduction, competitor firing, and a low-cost first Micro Job. Every block competes for the next ration of attention.
• Promises about Big Jobs must match delivery at the Core-Job level (Communication §3). Overpromise manufactures Problems at first use. The customer's brain registers the gap and re-routes attention away. Honest communication earns the attention again next time.

Test the one-liner against the sales-script question: can the buyer repeat what the product is, which Core Jobs it performs, and what value it gives, after one hearing? (Communication §5) If not, the one-liner didn't fit the attention budget. Rewrite until it does.

12. Subtraction is attention conservation — and the brain weights returned attention ~2× over added value

Subtraction names subtraction as the meta-operator across the four pillars. Through the attention lens: every subtraction returns attention the customer was already spending, and every addition asks for attention the customer hasn't yet committed. The ~2× asymmetry Subtraction §2(d) names is the brain weighting attention returned harder than value added at equal cost. The cognitive substrate (Adams 2021, Winter 2023) shows the bias runs at individual cognition, in language, and in AI tools, and amplifies upward into team behavior.

Four directions in which subtraction is attention conservation:

• Kill a Job returns the attention the customer used to spend on the Job. AirPods, Face ID, Apple Pay, Tesla's stripped-down interior, Square's QR-tipping — each deletes an attentional spend from the customer's day.
• Move up a level collapses many attentional spends into one. Uber collapsed buy · finance · insure · park · refuel · DMV · service · sell into open app · ride. ChatGPT collapsed find template · format headings · draft from blank · restructure later into prompt · review.
• Eliminate a negative emotion returns the attention the worry loop was consuming. Anxiety actively recurs, because the brain returns to the worry repeatedly. TurboTax accuracy guarantee, Wealthfront's "you'll be OK in retirement" framing.
• Reduce time-gaps returns the attention the wait was capturing. Compressed wait returns the attention the "is it done yet?" checking was consuming.

Before approving any feature, run the subtraction-first question: what attention can I remove that would produce a comparable or larger return? If the question has an answer, that answer is the higher-leverage move.

13. The advertising business model is 100% an attention-resale business

The advertising business model has one foundational economic structure. A free product captures users' attention, and that attention is then sold to advertisers who pay to redirect a slice of it to their own products. Every major ad-funded company runs this two-sided market. The asymmetric power of the model is that the user is not the customer — the advertiser is. So the product is optimized to maximize attention captured per user-second, not to maximize value delivered per user-second.

The pure-play attention businesses

• Google. Search ads sit at the Orientation Job "figure out what to buy" — the Previous Job before "buy." Organic search captures attention at the moment the Orientation Job fires. Ads sell a slice of that captured attention to the highest-bidding advertiser. Every product in Google's stack (Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Android) extends the surface on which attention is captured.
• Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp). Social feeds capture attention through variable-ratio reinforcement (Scientific Foundations §18). The customer scrolls because the next post might be valuable, and the uncertainty keeps attention engaged. Captured attention is sold to advertisers who inject sponsored posts.
• TikTok. The For You algorithm captures attention by serving content predicted to match the user's attention pattern. This is variable-ratio reinforcement on steroids, where every swipe is an attention gamble the algorithm optimizes to win.
• YouTube. Video content captures continuous attention. Ads sell slices before, during, and after each video.
• X (formerly Twitter), Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit. Same pattern — capture attention through content tuned to the platform's user base, sell slices to advertisers.

Why the model rests 100% on attention management

• The product's primary KPI is time-spent-on-platform. Not customer value delivered, not Big Jobs landed, not Critical Chains of Jobs completed. Time-spent is the proxy for attention captured, and attention captured is what's resold. Every product decision flows from this KPI.
• Variable-ratio reinforcement is the dominant attention-capture mechanic. Per Scientific Foundations §18, uncertainty in reward recruits sustained dopaminergic attention. Eyal's Hook Model — Trigger → Action → Variable Reward → Investment — is the operational template every ad-funded product runs.
• Notifications are externally-injected attention triggers. Push notification → home-screen badge → app open → variable reward → time-on-platform → ad impression → revenue. Each step is an attention-redirection move.
• The attention-economy critique (Hari 2022, Center for Humane Technology) names the externality. The customer's attention is a finite resource the customer would have spent elsewhere. The ad-funded product extracts that attention and resells it, and the customer pays in attention they didn't intend to spend.

Where advertising creates value and where it extracts it

• Value-creating advertising loads Consideration Activators. It informs the customer that a Job Graph they didn't know about exists, with a value delta and a named product. Tesla's pre-launch communication, Wealthfront's early educational content, ChatGPT's organic launch — all loaded Consideration Activators that the customer now uses to perform Big Jobs more energy-efficiently.
• Value-extracting advertising captures attention without loading useful Consideration Activators. It drives clicks without informing, manipulates triggers without informing, exploits variable-ratio reinforcement without delivering proportionate value.
• The distinction is empirical, not moral. A campaign is value-creating if the customer's post-campaign Job-performance efficiency is higher than before, and value-extracting if it is the same or lower.

Cross-references

• Value Creation §§2–8, §12 — value as energy efficiency (outcome/cost); cognitive cost; Aha as first attentional capture.
• Consideration Activators — Consideration Activators as the loader for attention to a new Job Graph; five attentional payloads.
• Behaviour Change §§5, 7, 8, 10 — Consideration Activators channels; Aha Moment/Problem neurobiology; trigger windows; familiar vs unfamiliar Core Job classes.
• Critical Chain of Jobs §4, §5, §7.4 — drop-off as Solution switch; chain-walk dynamics; interruptions.
• Job Types and Properties §6 — Orientation Jobs as the verb cluster that updates the Consideration Set.
• Communication — communication as attention engineering.
• Scientific Foundations §§1, 11, 15, 17, 18 — allostasis as the substrate; reward prediction error; habit physiology; curiosity; variable-ratio reinforcement.
• Subtraction — subtraction as the meta-operator; cognitive substrate of the addition bias.
• Focus & Attention Management — meta-framework view: focus and attention management as the same operation; subtraction as mechanism; fractal of scopes (customer · company · department · product portfolio · employee); focus at segment and Job levels; Innovator's Dilemma; sustaining focus over time; two-track investment discipline.