Mission Intelligence Systems

Attention calculator

Attention Concentration

We say we have eleven priorities. How many is the calendar actually running?

The effective number of initiatives your senior leadership hours support, and which ones fall below it.

All readiness calculators

The math

Here is the equation, so you can argue with it.

N = 1 / Σ sᵢ² where sᵢ = hᵢ / Σ h

Turn each initiative’s hours into a share of the total, square every share, add them up, and divide one by the sum. The result is the number of equally-resourced initiatives your calendar behaves like.

hᵢ
Senior leadership hours a week spent on initiative i
sᵢ
That initiative’s share of all the hours entered
Σ sᵢ²
The concentration index, one when everything is on a single initiative
N
The effective number of initiatives, always at most the number declared

Where the numbers come from

  • A month of senior leadership calendars, with each meeting, review and working block attributed to one initiative.
  • The list of initiatives currently described as priorities, however long it is.
  • Hours per week is enough precision. Rounding to the half hour does not move the answer.

Your numbers

What this needs from you

Everything stays in this browser. Nothing is sent anywhere, nothing is stored, and reloading the page clears it.

Initiatives and the senior leadership hours they get each week

One row per initiative currently called a priority. Hours from the calendar, not from intent.

initiativeHours per weekRemove

The answer

The effective number of initiatives your senior leadership hours support, and which ones fall below it.

These calculate and they do not diagnose. Every field asks for a figure your organization already keeps, from a calendar, a queue, a ledger, or a ranking your team wrote down, and what comes back is arithmetic on what you entered. Nothing here asks you to rate a condition from one to five, nothing here produces a score, and no answer on these pages is a reading of your organization. Where you want a measurement rather than a calculation, the diagnostics do that and they publish what they cannot tell you as well. An answer here is exactly as good as the figure you put in, which is why every calculator names where its inputs come from before it asks for them.

Effective number of initiatives

3.5

against 6 declared

Concentration index
0.284
sum of squared shares
Largest share
42%
Core platform migration
Below the line
2 of 6
7% of the hours
Hours entered
21.5
senior leadership, per week

What the number says

You named 6 initiatives and entered 21.5 hours of senior leadership time a week across them. Weighted by where the hours actually go, the calendar behaves like 3.5 initiatives.

The largest single initiative takes 42% of those hours.

2 of them sit below that line, sharing 7% of the hours, which is 1.5 hours a week between them.

What to do about it

  • Your list runs 2.5 initiatives longer than the hours support. Either cut it to about 4 and say which ones survived, or move hours onto the ones below the line. Doing neither is the decision you are already making, without saying so.
  • Customer retention push gets under 1 hour of leadership attention a week. At that level an initiative is not being deprioritized, it is being starved at a rate nobody decided. Stop it, hand it to somebody who has the hours, or put the hours on it.

Before you act on this

What this can and cannot tell you

Read this before acting on anything above. It is here to make the result more useful, not to hedge it.

  1. 1 of 4

    A reading is one vantage point, not the organization

    Every score here comes from what people could observe and were willing to report, from where they sit. A senior view stops where the information stops reaching it, and a team view is bounded by what the team has been told. That is a real signal about the organization, and it is not the same thing as ground truth. Treat a result as a claim to check against records, calendars, and the people closest to the work, not as a finding that has already been checked.

  2. 2 of 4

    A recommendation is a hypothesis, not an instruction

    What this produces is the most defensible next question given the pattern in the answers. It has no access to your funding cycle, your contracts, your regulator, your technology estate, or the person who is about to resign, and any one of those can be the real constraint while the instrument points somewhere else. The recommendation is worth acting on when your own judgment, and the evidence you can gather, agree with it. It is worth arguing with when they do not, and the disagreement is more useful than the score.

  3. 3 of 4

    Outcomes are decided in execution, by people and by systems

    Reading a diagnostic changes nothing. What changes an organization is a specific person with authority making a specific decision, and then the follow-through surviving contact with the work: competing priorities, staffing, incentives, contracts, data quality, system limits, vendors, and everything else outside these questions. Two organizations with identical results can end a year in opposite places, and the difference is what they did and what happened to them, not what they scored.

  4. 4 of 4

    Conditions move, so a result has a shelf life

    These readings describe a moment. A reorganization, a departure, a new system, or a change in demand can move a condition faster than any plan built on the old reading. Measure again rather than assuming a result still holds, and treat a number that has not moved as a question about whether anything actually changed.

What this one cannot do

Every calculator fails differently, so each says how.

This reads the hours you entered and nothing else. It cannot tell whether an initiative deserved the hours it got, whether the work below the line is being carried competently by somebody other than a senior leader, or whether a low number is a deliberate hand-off rather than neglect. A share is also only as honest as the attribution behind it, and a recurring meeting that covers four initiatives has to be split rather than assigned to whichever one is named in the invitation.

Reading path

The argument this equation came out of, in order.

A number changes a decision only when somebody already believes the thing it measures matters. These are the pieces that make that case, shortest first.

  1. Step 1 of 4

    The Attention Tax

    The hidden performance cost every organization pays when leadership focus is fragmented across too many simultaneous priorities.

  2. Step 2 of 4

    Priority Theater

    The organizational pattern of performing prioritization without actually doing it, and what it costs.

  3. Step 3 of 4

    One Goal Tomorrow

    The word priority was singular for five hundred years. When we pluralized it, we lost the discipline the word contained.

  4. Step 4 of 4

    The Calendar Audit

    The calendar is not a scheduling document. It is a confession: the most honest thing your organization has ever produced.

Where the math comes from

Keep going

The other calculators, and the instruments that do measure.

Alignment

Ranking Concordance

Everyone in the room said yes. Do they actually hold the same order of priorities?

Authority

Decision Latency

How long does a decision actually wait before the person who owns it makes it?

Adaptability

Signal Response Lag

The world moved in March. When did the plan move?

Across the four

Time Saving Realization

The pilot saved two hours a week per person. What is that worth?

Where you want your organization measured rather than your own figures calculated, the diagnostics do that. See what each one answers, including what it cannot tell you.