Over five decades of research have documented a central challenge: School leaders are confronted with a deluge of simultaneous demands. These demands have intensified in the past few decades, amidst the standards-based accountability movement and the COVID pandemic. Yet, school leaders - like all people - have limited time, energy, and effort (i.e., attentional resources) for managing all these demands. How do school leaders experience and manage multiple demands competing for their limited attention, especially times of crisis?I examine this question via data from two case studies: the first study leverages 41 interviews collected over 12 years to examine how seven principals experienced the challenge of multiple demands over time. The second case study draws on 75 interviews, 150 hours of observation, and social network data to examine how school leaders beyond the principal experienced but also tried to manage multiple demands. In this dissertation, I develop the construct of attentional dilemmas. I define attentional dilemmas as situations where school leaders -- due to multiple demands competing for their limited attention -- experienced messy choices between paying attention to multiple, highly desired values or goals, all of which could not be fully satisfied. School leaders coped with these dilemmas by sacrificing, or giving up on, important values and goals to attend to other highly important values and goals. Attentional dilemmas shed light into the complex tensions between school leaders' individual values and the practical constraints of schools amidst environments characterized by pluralistic interests and substantial turbulence. I also illuminate and celebrate the taken-for-granted, often invisible, actions that school leaders used to filter and sort through multiple demands -- what I call attentional practices -- so that they had the attentional resources to get to instruction in the first place. Simply put, paying attention took effort, and it took a lot of it. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]