Your Attention is Being Stolen From You

You're letting dozens of companies steal your time from you and completely fucking obliterate your focus. Are you that much of a pussy? I don’t think so.

Listen up. Whether it’s calendar events, emails, or other phone notifications, there’s an absurd amount of little things that are vying for your attention, and they WILL fatigue you.

When you're overwhelmed with notifications, you'll eventually ignore most of them, which defeats the purpose of them. You’ll start to view most things as unimportant because they’ll just become part of the noise.

Here's the problem:

If everything is telling you that they’re important, “the boy who cried wolf” syndrome sets in, and you’ll think everything is just some useless pop-up.

For those unaware of the story "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," it's a tale about a little punk who keeps pranking his villagers by saying that a wolf is killing all the sheep, but there's no wolf. It's just a joke! Eventually a wolf does show up, and when the little punk cries about it, nobody believes him because they think it's just another prank. So, the boy gets eaten by the wolf.

The moral of the story? If everything claims to be on the same level of importance as an emergency, your expectation for what an emergency is greatly lowers because you understand that all of these "emergencies" can't be possibly be that important if there are so many of them. Then, more radical alerts will be necessary to capture your attention.

How does this manifest itself in terms of phone notifications? Well, have you ever seen someone's phone, and you notice that they have an avalanche of notifications, yet none of them have been tended to? That's because that person has deemed all of those notifications on the same level:

• Amazon Prime Day's coming up? Same importance as a calendar alert to meet with a friend.

• $2 coupon for UberEats? As important to them as a text from their mother.

• Google wants you to know that you can achieve Google Maps God-Emperor Rank if you write 4 more reviews? That's as crucial as a voicemail from their grandpa.

You see the problem here, right?

I used to deal with this, too. I’d grab my phone every time it vibrated, made a noise, or lit up. My attention would be ripped away from whatever I was doing for what ended up being some unimportant nonsense. This made it difficult to maintain focus.

• "But it might be important."

• "I might miss something."

PLEASE stop bullshitting yourself. You and I both know that the only truly important things are calls, messages, and maybe emails. Everything else is only important in a certain context, so save your attention for those contexts.

Here's what you need to do if you want to get your time and attention back:

1. By default, do not allow any app to send you notifications.

2. Go through the apps, products, services that you use.

3. Whitelist the things that are actually important or urgent.

4. Even then, if you can change most notifications to "silent," do so.

5. Enjoy your free time and (only) your important notifications.

Once you do this, you can be more focused on what matters.

When you get a notification, you’ll know that it’s actually important, according to YOU, not based on what Zuckerberg, Bezos, or any other attention parasite says.