A ping from your phone or computer isn’t a suggestion. It’s a mental interloper. You pay an attentional price even if you never touch your phone or respond to the DM. That’s the part most “digital discipline” advice misses: the cost begins at the alert, not the reply. If you allow your mindspace to be intruded on – aurally, visually, however – you are already going to have to fight to get your mind back on track.

Stothart and colleagues ran an attention task while phones delivered either a brief notification (ring/vibrate) or nothing. Performance dropped just from the alert—no interaction—by an amount comparable to actively texting or calling during the task [of important note, in this paper they EXCLUDED anyone who actually checked their phone and were only comparing reduction in performance on attentional tests to other studies of active distraction]. The ping is the thing that starts to shred your attention, it’s not the content of the ping (though that worsens the tear). Who cares what Jimmy from Accounting needed to tell you? It’s how salience hijacks selection. You hear buzz → your brain does mental triage → the active task loses resources.¹ If you consciously process the signal, you cannot stop your mind from diverting precious cognitive cycles to thinking about whatever the content could be.

And then, the more time-expensive part. You’ve already let Jimmy pull you away from your task and into the vast infinitude of curiosity around whatever content could be in the message. You’ve chosen to look – you’re only human and IT COULD BE IMPORTANT. Sidenote: it was not important. Now, how long does it take to get back to fully focused on the pre-ping task? In a two-week field logging study at Microsoft Research, Iqbal & Horvitz instrumented 27 information workers. After an alert, users didn’t just “peek and pop back.” They entered a chain of diversions: open the notifying app, glance at something else, bounce through a couple of open browser windows, then – eventually – find their way back. On average, they spent ~10 minutes in the alert-driven switching itself plus another ~10–15 minutes before resuming focused work on the original task. Roughly 20–25 minutes of total recovery per unbatched alert. Twenty-seven percent of suspensions took >2 hours to truly resume.² So this probably overestimates how long it takes to return after a phone buzz that you don’t check (because in Iqbal people all responded on computers), so let’s maybe halve the recovery time in Iqbal (was 10-15 minutes) so ~5 minutes for a no-looker and 25 minutes for being a looky-loo. 

If that surprises you, let me introduce you to "attention residue." When you leave a task “open” in your head, part of your mind stays working on it (this is part of how the Bunny and Slalom Slope Schedules from Defragging Your Mind work). Swapping to something new doesn’t free up the memory completely – it splits it. Leroy’s experiments showed unfinished prior tasks impair performance on the next one; closure (or at least a crisp handoff) reduces the residue.³ So if you are smartly stacking activities, you should alternate between important and unimportant as per Defragging. If you’re just getting pulled around in a thousand directions by your notifications, there is going to be massive residue at each task and your thinking with less-than-full capabilities.

Now for a quantitative takeaway. If the average knowledge worker lets six different alerts breach their mental defenses and you take the bait to respond – email triage here, chat there, calendar pop up, two phone vibrations – you just bought yourself 6 × 22.5 min ≈ 135 minutes of recovery debt. And let’s be honest, who among us is actually only having 6 intrusion lapses per day; this is a normal hour for a lot of us. If, however, you batch to two scheduled checks (morning/mid-afternoon), both still “cost,” but you’ve converted 135 → ~45 minutes. That’s ~90 minutes back with no extra grit, just a little pre-day planning.

“Fine, but I have to answer quickly to my team. Speed matters in my business.” Sure – but responsiveness and interruptibility aren’t the same thing. Mark’s “No Email” experiment (five days, in-situ logging + HR monitors) cut window switching roughly in half and lengthened single-window dwell from a few minutes to something closer to optimally sustained stretches; on top of that stress physiology appeared to normalize (HRV). People felt more in control and they were objectively switching less.⁴ You don’t have to shut out the world; the lesson is give pings a door with planned openings instead of letting them blast through stochastically, annihilating any productive time you might have, and your health with them.

There’s a second-order cost that research has also found about constantly peppered work pings: we speed up to “make up” for interruptions. Mark, Gudith, and Klocke found interrupted participants completed tasks faster with equivalent quality – by working under higher stress, frustration, and time pressure.⁵ That compensation has a physical and mental cost. Most people call it “burn out.”

What to change that actually sticks:

• Narrow the door to your mind. Whitelist only critical channels for real-time alerts (e.g., direct mentions from your team lead). Everything else is silent by default.
  
  

• Schedule the opening of the door. Two or three windows (say, 8:30a and 1:00p +/- 4:30p) answer 95% of “fast enough” without paying four separate context costs. You can tweak this if your company demands it, just be aware of the trade-off you are making. Remember: reliability beats perpetual availability (for you and for them).
  
  

• Leave a breadcrumb before you switch. One sentence in the active doc: the very next line of code you’ll write; the specific analysis step; the opening clause of the paragraph. Iqbal & Horvitz found that visibility and cues about suspended work speed resumption.² Your breadcrumb is a custom cue you’ll actually use.
  
  

• Full-screen the primary app. Maximize the thing you’re doing; kill “peeking.” In Mark’s data, fewer windows visible meant less wandering on the way back.⁴
  
  

• Separate “scan” and “respond.” In an email window, do not try to read everything and reply to everything in one pass. One fast pass to classify and queue, one focused pass to write.

“But it’s not the alerts, it’s me. I’m just a compulsive checker.” Sure – and alerts make checking habitual. Kushlev et al. toggled people between high-notification and restricted periods; the high-notification condition increased inattention/hyperactivity symptoms (self-report) even in non-ADHD participants.⁶ We can argue about mechanisms, but the proximal control dial is obvious: reduce alerts and improve attention. If you need the dopamine release from scanning an inbox, do it at 10:30. Not at 10:31, 10:44, 11:03, and 11:09.

The payoff is simple: fewer mind breaches, more continuous thinking at your best. If you’re billing, you can price the minutes (and send me an email to michael@getgoldmind.com to tell me how much extra you made!). If you aren’t, you’ll still feel it in the second half of the day when your concentration isn’t confetti.

To the question “How many alerts should I allow?” – as few as your professional obligations truly require. You need to actually test this boundary and see how low you can go. For most people, that’s two to three batched checks and VIP-only pings. Everything else can wait. Your attention can’t.

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Endnotes

1. Stothart C, Mitchum A, Yehnert C. The attentional cost of receiving a cell phone notification. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2015;41(4):893–897.
   
   

2. Iqbal ST, Horvitz E. Disruption and Recovery of Computing Tasks: Field Study, Analysis, and Directions. CHI ’07.
   
   

3. Leroy S. 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. 2009;109(2):168–181.
   
   

4. Mark G, Voida S, Cardello AV. “A Pace Not Dictated by Electrons”: An Empirical Study of Work Without Email. CHI 2012.
   
   

5. Mark G, Gudith D, Klocke U. The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress. CHI 2008.
   
   

6. Kushlev K, Proulx J, Dunn EW. “Silence Your Phones”: Smartphone Notifications Increase Inattention and Hyperactivity Symptoms. CHI 2016.