Your attention may soon appear on the timesheet

Under a discussion paper now circulating ahead of a European industrial-relations forum, an employer could in future pay not for the hours a person is present but for the minutes in which that person is measurably concentrating. Attention would be read by consumer earbuds of the kind already sold for sleep tracking, supplemented by gaze data from headsets the company had originally bought for training videos.

The paper mandates nothing and dates nothing. Its opening chapter makes the correct observation that attention has never been bought directly in the history of paid work — it has been rented in eight-hour blocks and hoped for. The proposal is simply that the hoping stop, a sentence the drafters appear to have written without hearing it.

The working day would acquire a numerator and a denominator. Present: nine hours. Billable focus: four hours and eleven minutes. The shortfall would not be described as theft. It would be described as unpriced presence, a term used forty times in the draft and never once defined in a form that a person could argue with in front of a panel.

“Nobody would be paid less for thinking,” a spokesperson for the working group would be expected to say. “They would be paid less for thinking in a way our instruments cannot see. We accept that these sound similar. We would ask for time to explain the difference, which the instrument would record as focus.”

Staff in the modelled pilot would find the boundary within a fortnight. Working a problem out while looking at a wall — the part most people would name as the actual job — reads as low arousal and no fixation, and therefore as nothing. Clearing an inbox reads beautifully. The predicted adaptation would not be fraud but relocation: thinking done at home, earning done at the desk.

Appeals would be provided for. An employee who disputed a day's figure could request the underlying trace, which the framework describes as the employee's own record while assigning its custody to the employer. The draft does not address the case in which a person clearly remembers concentrating and the trace does not agree, beyond noting that the trace would be retained for years and the memory would not.

None of this is legislated, costed or scheduled, and the forum stresses that the paper exists to structure a debate. What it has structured so far is a question nobody had to ask while the unit of work was an hour: not whether the employer may watch the desk, which was settled long ago, but whether it may price what is happening a few centimetres behind the eyes.