Attention Is the Scarce Thing: Notifications, Feeds and Focus
Information is plentiful; the attention to take it in is not. A few deliberate settings give you back a surprising amount of focus.
Every app on your phone would like a little more of your time. Individually the requests seem small. Together they shape how a day feels and how much of it you spend doing what you meant to do.
The attention economy
The attention economy is an approach that treats human attention as a scarce commodity. The economist Herbert Simon observed decades ago that an abundance of information creates a scarcity of the attention needed to consume it. Many digital services make money by capturing as much of that scarce attention as they can, which is why their default settings tend to favour more notifications, autoplay and endless feeds.
Audit your notifications
Go through your phone's notification settings once and sort apps into three groups:
- People. Messages and calls from real people you want to hear from. Keep these.
- Useful alerts. Deliveries, calendar reminders, security codes. Keep, but silence where possible.
- Everything else. Promotions, "you might like", streak reminders and news alerts. Turn these off.
Make the phone less sticky
- Move distracting apps off the home screen, or into a folder.
- Turn off autoplay where the app allows it.
- Use a focus or do-not-disturb mode during work and before sleep.
- Charge the phone outside the bedroom.
Single-tasking
Switching between tasks has a cost: each switch takes a moment to reorient, and frequent switching leaves a task half-finished in the back of your mind. Setting aside blocks of time for one thing, with the phone out of reach, is one of the simplest ways to get more done with less strain.
Check in, do not check constantly
Instead of responding to every ping, try checking email and messages at set times. Most messages can wait an hour, and the people who need you urgently will usually call.
Notice where your attention goes
For a day or two, jot down each time you pick up your phone without a clear reason, and what you were doing just before. Patterns usually appear quickly: a pause in a conversation, waiting for a kettle, the first minute after waking. Once you can see the cue, it becomes much easier to decide in advance what to do instead, whether that is simply waiting, looking out of the window or finishing the sentence you were writing.
Protect the edges of the day
The first and last half hour of the day set the tone for what lies between. Starting the morning with messages and news hands your attention to other people before you have decided what matters to you. Ending the evening on a bright screen makes winding down harder. Keeping both edges screen-free, even for a short while, is one of the changes people most often say they would not give up.
Small, reversible experiments
You do not need to throw the phone away. Try one change for a week, notice how it feels, and keep what helps.
Written by Juno Prentiss · revised 2026-11-09