It’s 9:12 a.m. on a Tuesday in June. The window is open, you can faintly hear the ocean. You have one goal this morning: finish the presentation you’ve been putting off for three days. Your phone buzzes. An email. You glance at it, two seconds, no more. At 9:23, you reply on Slack. At 9:36, you accept a last-minute meeting. At 9:54, you review a document you hadn’t planned to look at. At 10:31, you look up and wonder what you were even doing.
The presentation, meanwhile, hasn’t moved an inch.
And that’s when the guilt kicks in. Another hour gone. Why do I always let myself get pulled in like this? You promise yourself you’ll get more organized, turn off your notifications, finally find that discipline that seems to come so naturally to everyone else.
Except the problem is bigger than that.
“We’re far too weak to stand up to what we’re up against,” says Yves Marry, co-founder of Lève les yeux, an association that raises awareness among children and adults about the overwhelming place screens have taken in our lives. “Giants, with astronomical budgets and armies of engineers, are building massive capture strategies.” Every interruption is designed to bring us back, and then keep us there a little longer.
You don’t need to become a digital monk. Taking back control of your attention simply means getting to choose where your time goes, and with it, the quality of your work.
Attention: your most undervalued asset
We spend more time talking about work than actually doing it.
Brace yourself: after sifting through more than 500,000 hours of remote work, one study found that barely half of that time was spent on the work itself. The rest went to emails, meetings and messages we could easily have done without.
Why this shipwreck? The answer starts with cognition. Yves Marry explains that our attention runs on two distinct modes. “There’s deep attention, and reflexive attention.” Deep attention is what lets us write, solve a problem, or simply come up with a good idea. Reflexive attention, on the other hand, is what lets us react to urgency, to danger. “Today, our reflexive attention is being called on constantly,” he explains. A notification, a message, a vibration… and the brain reacts instantly.
The catch is that by constantly feeding our reflexive attention, we let our deep attention waste away. “Whatever we stop training gets weaker,” warns Yves Marry. Like a muscle that no longer gets used.
And yet it’s precisely in that depth that value gets created. A new idea, a problem finally solved: none of that is born between two notifications. Cal Newport, the academic who popularized the notion of deep work, puts it this way: “It’s a first-order activity. It’s your primary mission.”
Chosen focus time should be blocked into our calendars like our most important appointments. That doesn’t mean becoming unreachable, just no longer being permanently interruptible.
The companies that have taken back control
The good news is that a growing number of organizations have caught on. In January 2023, Shopify launched a “calendar purge“: a bot simply deleted 12,000 recurring meetings involving three or more people. The result was roughly 322,000 hours freed up over the year, and, more importantly, 25% more projects completed. Its CEO, Kaz Nejatian, sums up the philosophy this way: “Meetings are a bug, not a feature of work.”
Elsewhere, Asana has protected its No Meeting Wednesdays for over a decade, and Slack introduced Maker Weeks, where meetings and notifications are cut to make room for creating. And in early 2026, Instagram’s head, Adam Mosseri, asked his teams to decline any meeting that fell during their focus blocks.
Leaders follow the same kind of routines: Jeff Bezos has always refused any major meeting before 10 a.m., because he values being able to take his time to “wander.” In France, Juliette Levy, founder of Oh My Cream, blocks off every other Friday, guilt-free, to recharge and stay, in her own words, fully operational.
The movement now extends beyond the world of work. In New York, London or Berlin, part of Gen Z is doing exactly the opposite of what was expected of them: trading their smartphone for a flip phone. The success of the Light Phone, deliberately designed to be “boring,” and movements like #BringBackFlipPhones suggest a shift may be underway.
What if the real method was to get bored ?
Every productivity method promises you the same thing: free up time so you can cram in more. We’re going to suggest the opposite, something you’ve probably been avoiding for years: emptiness.
One single thing per day. Instead of an endless to-do list. The task that actually matters, the one that demands your whole brain. Schedule it during your cognitive peak, when your attention is at its strongest (often in the morning). And give it one to two hours. Consider that if that’s all you do, the day is a success. Everything else – emails, check-ins, small emergencies – will find its place around it, in the gaps. Instead of squeezing deep work in between demands on your attention, you squeeze those demands in around your deep work. During that block, put your phone in another room. Yves Marry stresses this point: our relationship with our smartphone is a matter of boundaries. “A box in a dedicated corner of your home, so it doesn’t take over.” What’s true for your calendar is also true for your home.
Don’t fill the gaps. That pause between two meetings, that line at the bakery, those five minutes before a call: don’t fill them. Leave the phone in your pocket. Leave the emptiness. It’ll feel uncomfortable, and that’s normal. Yves Marry describes bouts of boredom that can feel almost dizzying, where you no longer know what to do with your hands. Except it’s precisely in those gaps that the brain, finally freed, connects ideas together. Good ideas almost never show up in front of a screen. They come to you in the shower, while walking, in the emptiness you had the nerve not to fill.
Schedule your scrolling, like dessert. Taking back control isn’t about forbidding yourself things, it’s about choosing. You have every right to scroll, to take a breather, to wander, but at a time you’ve chosen. Twenty deliberate minutes of social media at the end of the day are worth a thousand times more than a hundred stolen glances between two files. Same amount of time spent, except this time, you’re the one deciding.
Nobody gets it right on the first try. According to Yves Marry, it’s a gradual process, taken in small steps. He likes to compare it to becoming vegetarian: you don’t switch overnight, you move forward in stages, raising the bar as you start to take a liking to it.
Still, willpower alone isn’t enough. It’s also a matter of culture: a work environment that values focus, where stepping away isn’t seen as suspicious, where you can disappear into your own bubble for an hour before rejoining everyone else over coffee, already does most of the job.
And what do you actually get back?
A brain that works properly again. The ability to dive into a problem and come out the other side with a solution. And behind the hours saved and the projects delivered: the pleasure of staying with an idea long enough to watch it take shape. That feeling of looking up at the end of the morning and thinking: “This time, I really made progress.”
So don’t think of chosen time as one more discipline to uphold this summer. Think of it instead as a freedom you’d let slip away, one you can quietly take back, at your own pace.
So, where do we start?
