A Personal Time Ledger with Owner-Declared Priorities

Digital products compete for a resource that cannot be enlarged: a person’s day. Operating-system dashboards report time per application, and research on digital well-being shows that people spend more time on some uses than they say they want to. Yet mainstream tools do not compare time spent with the alternatives the owner had, and they do not let the owner say which hours matter more. This paper specifies and analyzes Attentim, a personal time ledger. It treats each day as an equal, non-storable endowment of 86,400 seconds; records, on the owner’s device, which claimant consumed each second; and lets the owner declare time-of-day weights, activity values, and feasible alternatives. From these it computes an owner-declared allocation shortfall, the weighted gap between the best feasible use of each second and its actual use, and an alignment index that adapts the actual–ideal time-use discrepancy of the life-balance literature to logged phone time and self-logged off-phone time; the daily statement presents both at a level of detail the owner chooses, from one sentence to the full ledger. The same declared weights initialize a reservation-price schedule, calibrated by elicitation, should anyone ever bid for the owner’s time. A once-only time budget, one committed allocation root per personhood credential per day, lets owners publish records about their time that the same credential cannot count twice, without exporting the ledger, and we prove that, given a consistent log and standard cryptographic assumptions, the budget accepts at most one root per credential per day. We give a worked example, a threat model, and a three-arm trial protocol designed for preregistration, with its endpoints and power. The ledger makes no payment and sells nothing: it is a mirror. A companion note specifies how published records could be used by an externally funded contribution pool.