Our notifications are renting out our attention

Over an hour-long conversation with a friend last night, I counted how many times the phones on the table lit up. Twenty-three. Only two were genuinely urgent: a message from a family member and an appointment reminder. The rest were discounts, "picks for you", a game announcing that our energy had refilled, and news that a stranger had liked someone else's post.

That small tally sums up one of the least discussed truths of digital life. Notifications do not speak for us; they speak in our place. Increasingly, it is not we who decide what to look at, what matters, or which app to return to.

The hidden cost of the attention economy

The tech industry has a name for this: the attention economy. Put simply, the real product of many free services is the user's time and focus. The longer we stay on screen, the more adverts we see and the more data we generate. Notifications are the doorbell of that system, each one an invitation carefully timed, coloured and sometimes deliberately vague, designed to pull us back in.

Attention is a finite resource. Knowing who spends ours matters as much as knowing who spends our money.

The price is not just a few lost minutes. A single alert arriving while we are concentrating can delay our full return to the task for a surprisingly long time. Attention broken dozens of times a day makes deep thinking, sustained reading and even properly listening to the person opposite us much harder.

It would be unfair to place the whole burden on individuals. "Just put your phone down" is easy advice to give, but work messages, school updates, banking and family conversations now all run through the same device. The real question is whose interests the default settings on our phones and apps are designed to serve.

Designers and companies have an obvious opportunity here. Notifications could be off by default. Important alerts could be clearly separated from marketing. Users could be shown, honestly, how many times they were interrupted each day. Some apps are already moving this way, and rather than losing users, they seem to be earning trust.

Fixing our relationship with technology does not require running away from it. It requires rebuilding an arrangement in which the device works for us. Perhaps the first step is to pause the next time the phone buzzes and ask a simple question: do I need this notification, or does it need me?