What is attention debt?

Attention debt is a concept in personal epistemology: Chronic attention splitting creates a deficit that manifests as exhaustion and poor judgment.

Example: A product manager runs her weeks on a pattern she considers normal: forty-minute focus blocks interrupted by Slack, three hours of meetings daily, email triage between every context switch. She sleeps seven hours. She exercises. She considers herself disciplined. But every Friday she notices the same thing — small decisions that should take minutes take an hour, she rereads paragraphs three times without comprehending them, and her weekend feels like it barely dents the fog. She attributes it to 'a busy week.' But the following Monday, she starts at eighty percent capacity instead of a hundred. By Wednesday, she is back to Friday's fog. She is not having busy weeks. She is carrying attention debt forward, compounding it, and mistaking the interest payments for normal life.

This concept is part of Phase 4 (Attention and Focus) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for attention and focus.