An essay for the DEV.to community on why focus became the most valuable thing we own, and what to do about it.
The thing no one can scale
Over the last few years, almost everything in our working lives got cheaper, faster, or easier to automate. Drafting, summarizing, translating, prototyping, searching: tasks that once took an afternoon now take a prompt and a few seconds. Compute is abundant. Information is abundant. Even first drafts are abundant.
One thing did not get cheaper: the focused, uninterrupted attention of a human being. Every one of us still has the same waking hours and the same limited capacity to hold a hard problem in mind. As everything around attention has become cheap, attention itself has become the bottleneck, and therefore the most valuable input in knowledge work.
This is not a new idea. In 1971, the economist and cognitive scientist Herbert Simon observed that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. What is new is how completely his prediction has arrived.
What the measurements say
The most useful research here comes from Gloria Mark, a professor emerita of informatics at UC Irvine, who has spent more than twenty years measuring how people attend to screens. Her early studies, starting in the early 2000s, found that people stayed on a single screen for about two and a half minutes on average before switching. By around 2020, across her own studies and those of other researchers, that average had fallen to roughly 47 seconds.
Two details from her work deserve attention. First, the blame does not rest on technology alone. Mark estimates that about half of these switches are self-interruptions: we get tempted to check something, look something up, or peek at an inbox. Second, the cost of switching is not just the second or two it takes to click. Her research suggests that recovering from a real interruption can take close to half an hour.
The organizational researcher Sophie Leroy gave one reason for that cost a name in 2009: attention residue. When we switch away from an unfinished task, part of our mind stays behind with it, which leaves less capacity for whatever we switched to. Fragmented days leave a lot of residue.
The workday that never ends
The pandemic years pushed more knowledge work into chat, email, and video calls, and the boundaries of the day blurred. Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index special report described an "infinite workday," with meetings after 8 p.m. up 16 percent year over year and a large share of people checking email before 6 a.m.
The report's most quoted line is that workers are interrupted every two minutes by a meeting, email, or notification, about 275 times a day. It is worth reading that number carefully. A later correction published by one outlet noted that, per Microsoft's methodology, the two-minute figure covers core work hours and the 275 total spans a full 24 hours, and that both figures describe the most heavily pinged fifth of users rather than the average worker. So the honest summary is not "everyone is interrupted 275 times a day." It is that heavy communication loads are real, measurable, and concentrated in exactly the roles many of us hold.
There is a lesson in that caution too. Attention is also a casualty of sloppy statistics. A viral claim that humans now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish never held up, and sharing it was itself a small act of inattention.
Why this matters more in the age of AI
AI tools have changed what is scarce. When generating a plausible draft, a summary, or a block of output costs almost nothing, the expensive part moves to everything a machine cannot do for us: deciding what is worth making, noticing what is subtly wrong, and taking responsibility for the result.
That work is attention-shaped. Reviewing generated output is not skimming. It requires a rested, undistracted mind that can hold the context, notice the thing that does not fit, and say no. If anything, the more we automate production, the more our value concentrates in judgment, and judgment degrades fastest when attention is fragmented.
There is an irony worth naming. The research field that gave us modern AI built its breakthrough on a mechanism it named attention. The 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need" showed that letting a model decide what to focus on, rather than treating all inputs equally, was enormously powerful. We spent years engineering selective focus into machines while letting our own erode.
Treating attention like a budget
If attention is the scarce resource, we should manage it with the seriousness we bring to money, time, or infrastructure. A few ideas, drawn from the research above and from writers like Cal Newport, who popularized the case for deep, distraction-free work:
• Design your day around your own rhythm. Mark's research suggests people have individual peaks and troughs of focus, so put your hardest work in your peak window and your breaks near the dips, rather than copying a one-size-fits-all timer.
• Notice the traps. Because so many switches are self-initiated, building awareness of the moment you reach for a distraction is often more useful than blocking everything.
• Protect quiet time deliberately. Treat uninterrupted blocks as a calendar commitment, not a leftover.
• Make goals visible. Attention is goal-directed, and goals slip away quickly. Write the one thing you are trying to finish and keep it in view.
• Allow easy, restful activities. Mark notes that undemanding, engaging breaks can help reset a tired mind. The aim is intention, not abstinence.
• Teams, not just individuals. Norms for response times, meeting-free blocks, and fewer after-hours pings do more than personal discipline can, because one person's interruption is another person's workload.
The takeaway
The last few years taught us how to make nearly everything faster. They also revealed what speed cannot buy: a mind that can stay with a hard problem long enough to understand it. That capacity is not a productivity hack. It is the raw material of good decisions, careful reviews, thoughtful design, and honest relationships with the people we work with.
If you take one thing from this essay, let it be a reframe. Your attention is not a free resource that the world is entitled to. It is the scarcest, most valuable thing you have, and every notification, meeting, and tab is a request to spend it. Spend it on purpose.
Sources
Simon, H. A. (1971). "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World." In M. Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest. Johns Hopkins Press.
Mark, G. (2023). Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. Hanover Square Press.
Schelenz, R. (2024). "How to sharpen your attention and meet your goals" (interview with Gloria Mark). UC Newsroom, University of California. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/how-sharpen-your-attention-and-meet-your-goals-2024
Lamadrid, D. (2025, January 14). "Reclaiming Your Focus in a World Designed to Distract You with Dr. Gloria Mark." Allwork.Space. https://allwork.space/2025/01/reclaiming-your-focus-in-a-world-designed-to-distract-you-with-dr-gloria-mark/
Leroy, S. (2009). "Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2).
Microsoft (2025, June 17). "Breaking down the infinite workday," Work Trend Index Special Report. Summary at https://news.microsoft.com/de-ch/2025/06/17/new-microsoft-study-reveals-the-rise-of-the-infinite-workday-40-of-employees-check-email-before-6-a-m-evening-meetings-up-16/
Silicon Canals. Article on Microsoft's interruption figures, with correction dated 3 October 2026 clarifying the scope of the 275-ping and two-minute statistics. https://siliconcanals.com/m-by-one-2025-microsoft-tally-a-worker-is-interrupted-every-two-minutes-of-the-working-day-around-275-times-as-after-hours-pings-and-meetings-past-eight-in-the-evening-kee/
Vaswani, A., et al. (2017). "Attention Is All You Need." arXiv:1706.03762.
Newport, C. (2016). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Grand Central Publishing.
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