In an age where the average person checks their phone 96 times daily, reclaiming our attention has become one of the most urgent challenges of modern life. We can fight back against the attention economy through both individual resistance strategies and collective action to reshape the systems designed to capture our focus.
The solution requires a multi-pronged approach: personally implementing boundaries, collectively organizing for attention-focused regulations and creating alternative digital spaces, and systemically realigning economic incentives to prioritize human well-being over corporate profits. Keep reading if you want to reclaim the attention span that’s been stolen from you.
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How Can We Reclaim Our Attention?
In his book The Sirens’ Call, Chris Hayes explains that we can take action, individually and collectively, to resist the attention economy and demand a healthier path forward.
Resist the Attention Economy Personally
Hayes acknowledges that individual resistance to the attention economy faces enormous challenges, but argues that personal strategies remain both necessary and potentially effective. The attention economy is designed by teams of engineers and psychologists using billions of dollars and sophisticated technology to exploit human psychology. Individual willpower alone can’t consistently overcome such systematic manipulation. But individual action, while it can’t solve a systemic problem, can help you reduce harm as larger changes develop—and it gives you a way to model more thoughtful approaches for others to follow.
The most radical personal strategy Hayes proposes is abandoning smartphones in favor of “dumb phones,” which can make calls and send texts but can’t access the internet or run apps. Hayes argues that smartphones have become so central to the attention economy’s business model that opting out represents a form of economic resistance as well as personal protection. For those unwilling or unable to abandon smartphones, Hayes suggests implementing strict boundaries around digital engagement—turning off all nonessential notifications, using website and app blockers during focused work periods, and establishing phone-free zones to eliminate as many involuntary attention triggers as possible from daily life.
(Shortform note: Hayes frames switching to “dumb phones” as a form of personal protection and economic resistance against attention extraction, but this solution isn’t feasible for everyone. Many dumb phones cost $299 to $799—often more than basic smartphones. Meanwhile, many jobs now require smartphones even for low-wage positions, and essential services increasingly assume smartphone access for banking, navigation, and communication. Many dumb phone users keep a smartphone as backup for tasks that require app-based authentication. This suggests that opting out may be more symbolic than systemic—a choice available primarily to those with economic flexibility and privilege.)
Hayes also recommends consuming media through formats that resist attention extraction techniques. Reading physical newspapers and books helps you engage with content designed for sustained attention, and listening to long-form podcasts or watching documentary films exercises the cognitive muscles required for deep focus. Choosing subscription-based media over advertising-supported platforms reduces exposure to attention-optimized content designed primarily to deliver eyeballs to advertisers.
(Shortform note: Research supports some benefits of switching from digital to physical media: In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr notes that reading on paper instead of on screens yields greater comprehension. But critics argue this misses the structural problem: For instance, in Indistractable, Nir Eyal contends that technology isn’t the root cause of distraction, and workplace culture and environmental factors are more to blame than our digital devices. A bigger challenge may be that individual media choices don’t address the economic incentives driving attention-capture design.)
Perhaps most importantly, Hayes emphasizes cultivating an awareness of where your attention is going, whether that allocation serves your interests, and what you might be missing while focused on digital content. He explains that the practice of meditation, while not explicitly political, can become a form of resistance by strengthening your ability to exercise your voluntary attention and reducing your susceptibility to the capture of your involuntary attention.
| Mindfulness as a Tool Similar to Hayes’s advice, Gloria Mark, author of Attention Span, also recommends mindfulness as a method to increase your concentration power. Mark explains that when you concentrate, your attention is goal-oriented, but the impulses that distract you aren’t, meaning they come from different areas of the brain. Concentrating on a task physiologically changes sections of the brain, but only temporarily. When those changes fade, your ability to concentrate wears thin and you grow vulnerable to instinctive reactions, such as responding to social media notifications or giving in to the urge to snack instead of work. Mark says that it isn’t practical to fight your brain’s instincts indefinitely, and trying to do so can only lead to stress. Instead of trying to control your every impulse, you should try to become more aware of your attentional state and your energy level so you can harness the dynamic nature of your attention and keep your self-control from slipping away entirely. For instance, Mark suggests finding logical stopping points in tasks that require steady concentration. If you schedule time to step away from a project so you can check your email or chat with a colleague, then you can minimize the wear and tear on your brain of trying to do several things at once. Another way to free up mental resources is to jot down details of things you leave unfinished so that they don’t live rent-free in your head and distract you from other priorities. |
Find Balance
In Attention Span, Gloria Mark advocates a balance between periods of deep concentration, more “mechanical” tasks, and breaks to let your mind recharge. To achieve this, she recommends practicing three skills: self-awareness, planning your time, and self-moderation.
Self-Awareness
To begin with, Mark suggests that you learn your mind’s natural rhythm—when does your ability to concentrate go up and down throughout the day? This is different for each person, despite what our assigned work schedules might suggest. Some people concentrate best in the morning, while others find it easiest later in the day or at night. Also, which weekday it is makes a difference—some of us are more productive on Monday, while others need several days to ramp up. Once you figure out your personal rhythm, you’ll be able to schedule your high-concentration projects for the times when you have the most energy to spend.
However, Mark also suggests that you take the time to consciously observe your daily activities and ask how important they are. Are you wasting time on things that don’t contribute to your overall goals? Do you gain something from your time on social media, or do you simply check it out of habit? You may find that some of the “mindless” things you do bring you joy and replenish your energy, while some of the “important” things you do aren’t providing a return on your mental investment.
Planning
Mark writes that once you’ve figured out the patterns of your concentration and decided which tasks are most productive, you can design your day to optimize your cognitive resources instead of just scheduling tasks. This includes incorporating “downtime”—periods of rest or easy activities that help replenish your mental capacity. For instance, if your plan includes spending two hours working on an urgent report, perhaps schedule a long lunch or a walk in the park immediately after instead of planning to plow straight ahead into a meeting or a huge stack of emails.
Mark also stresses that when planning your day, you should consider the emotional impact of your to-do list. While some tasks are uplifting, others can bring you down, even if they don’t require a lot of mental energy. For instance, if you have to make a brief but unpleasant phone call, schedule a pleasant reset before your next assignment. In other words, don’t just think about what you want to accomplish for the day—plan for how you want to feel at the end of it. You’ll be able to maintain your attention better if you strategically intersperse things you like to do around the things you dread.
Self-Moderation
The final piece to the puzzle of taking control of your attention is to learn how to gently steer yourself back when you’ve lost focus. While there are digital apps that can help, such as programs that limit internet access or timers that restrict your email usage, Mark is leery of these since they’re a crutch that prevents you from learning real self-control. Instead, she recommends learning to resist your urges to switch from task to task by reminding yourself how much better you feel when you see things through to completion.
Mark also suggests that you can plant triggers to bring you out of distracting behaviors. For instance, if you plan to take a break by playing games on your phone, you can schedule it for 10 minutes before you have to leave for an important meeting. That way, you still get the recharge from relaxing without being lured into the endless, wasteful spiral of “one more minute on this game.” In other words, if you plan time to recharge, build an on-ramp back into your schedule to help you fight the urge to be unproductive.
In conclusion, Mark emphasizes that while you can’t remove every distraction, you can engage your limited attention more wisely. Computers, the internet, and smartphones aren’t going away, and though they were intended to enhance our capabilities, they often exhaust and distract us instead. Nevertheless, Mark insists that we’re still at the dawn of the digital age, and she’s optimistic that we still have the power to shape it. Suppose you take back the power to direct your attention and balance your overall cognitive load as you navigate the digital world. In that case, you can lead a mentally healthier life without sacrificing productivity and creativity.
Take Action at the Collective Level
Personal resistance strategies, while valuable, cannot address the structural forces driving attention extraction across society. Hayes argues that meaningful change requires collective action to create alternative systems and advocate for broader social changes that prioritize human attention and well-being over corporate profits. He explains that “attention resistance” groups like Friends of Attention are beginning to organize for limits on attention extraction, cognitive safety protections, and the right to mental privacy.
(Shortform note: Hayes points to Friends of Attention as an example of emerging attention resistance movements, and such organizations can provide valuable personal benefits for participants through practices like sustained focus exercises and community building. But they face significant barriers to scaling into the mass resistance necessary to challenge billion-dollar attention extraction industries. Friends of Attention, which emerged from a 2018 art symposium, remains concentrated among educated, predominantly white academics and artists in major cities. Participating in their activities requires leisure time and cultural capital that may be inaccessible to the working-class people most affected by attention extraction.)
Hayes also identifies the potential for businesses to profit by helping people reclaim their attention rather than extracting it. This includes companies offering distraction-free productivity tools, meditation apps that don’t track user data, and social media platforms designed for meaningful connection rather than maximizing engagement. The demand for these solutions has become so apparent that even Apple and Google now build screen time monitoring and app usage controls into their operating systems, while subscription-based services that eliminate advertising continue gaining traction.
Community-based resistance strategies offer another avenue for collective action. Hayes advocates for creating and participating in private, invitation-only online spaces that operate without advertising or algorithmic manipulation. These might include private group chats, email lists, or small forums where conversations can occur without the attention-extraction pressures of commercial platforms. The goal is to model what healthy digital communication looks like while building networks of people committed to protecting their collective cognitive resources.
(Shortform note: The strategy of creating alternative online spaces faces what political scientist Albert Hirschman calls the “exit vs. voice” dilemma: When dissatisfied people can easily leave a flawed system, they’re less likely to stay and fight to improve it. The recent Twitter/X exodus illustrates this problem: As Elon Musk’s changes drove millions of users to platforms like Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon, the result wasn’t a reform of X but further fragmentation of online discourse and a weakening of any collective pressure for X to change its policies. This creates a paradox: The people most motivated to resist attention extraction are precisely those who can most easily afford to exit to alternatives, leaving others behind.)
| The Illusion of Choice in Collective Solutions Hayes’s collective action proposals face a challenge illustrated by the Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits.” In this dystopian future, characters believe they’re making autonomous choices between options like “apple or banana” at vending machines, while being systematically guided toward outcomes that serve the system’s profit motives. Similarly, we participate willingly in systems that constrain our options from the moment we sign up—a dynamic that applies directly to solutions like subscription services and time-monitoring tools. When Apple and Google add screen time controls to their operating systems, or when we join private social networks, are we exercising genuine resistance or simply choosing between pre-approved alternatives? We might feel empowered by selecting distraction-free tools while remaining within attention-extracting ecosystems, a paradox that questions human agency itself. Neuroscience research suggests that environmental factors shape our decisions far more than we realize,and if changing our digital environment simply substitutes one set of influences for another, then collective action becomes less about liberation and more about choosing which forces shape our behavior. |
Realign Economic Incentives
The most ambitious solutions Hayes proposes involve changes to the economic structures that make attention extraction profitable. His most radical proposal is government-mandated limits on attention extraction—such as a legislated cap on hours of screen time or restrictions on the types of psychological manipulation techniques that platforms can legally employ—similar to how labor laws limit the number of hours employers can require workers to spend on the job. Hayes acknowledges that such regulations would face fierce opposition from technology companies and people who might view them as restrictions on personal freedom.
The framework Hayes envisions would require developing new legal precedents to treat attention as a protected resource, similar to how environmental regulations protect air and water quality. He proposes changes to how tech companies can measure and optimize their success: Government agencies could require them to report metrics like user satisfaction, well-being outcomes, or the quality rather than quantity of attention captured. He argues that workplace safety regulations, environmental protection laws, and consumer protection standards all represent cases where government intervention constrained corporate behavior to protect public welfare—and that the attention economy deserves similar regulatory responses.
(Shortform note: Hayes’s call for government regulation touches on a question that extends beyond technology policy: Should critics of existing power structures work within existing institutions to create change or seek to transform them entirely? Queer theorist Samuel Clowes Huneke (A Queer Theory of the State) notes that critics find themselves trapped between “the empirical need for the state and queer theory’s inability to articulate why [we need it]”. Hayes faces a similar contradiction: He critiques the attention economy as a form of systematic exploitation, yet his solutions depend entirely on trusting that the same regulatory apparatus that enabled attention capitalism can be reformed to constrain it.)
Hayes acknowledges significant challenges in implementing such systemic changes. Technology companies possess enormous political influence and financial resources to resist regulation. The global nature of digital platforms complicates national regulatory approaches, and the technical complexity of attention extraction makes it difficult to craft effective regulations without stifling beneficial technological innovation. But the ultimate goal Hayes articulates is to create an economic system where human attention serves human flourishing rather than corporate profits. This would require not just regulatory changes but cultural shifts in how society values and protects cognitive resources.
| The Challenges of Regulating the Attention Economy Experts might disagree about whether Hayes’s specific ideas are feasible, but most agree some form of government intervention is necessary and possible. Research suggests that transparency measures—like requiring apps to display “typical daily minutes of use” or warning labels about cognitive impacts—could reduce demand for attention-harvesting products. The European Union has begun implementing attention-focused regulations by banning manipulative “dark patterns” (interface designs that trick users into unwanted actions, like making it easy to accept cookies but difficult to refuse them), requiring transparency about recommendation algorithms, and mandating risk assessments for mental health impacts. However, several obstacles complicate Hayes’s vision of attention regulation. First, measuring attention costs proves technically difficult: Unlike environmental pollution, attention capture operates through complex psychological mechanisms that vary between individuals and contexts. Second, the global nature of digital platforms means that national regulations can be circumvented, necessitating international coordination. Third, the tension between regulation and personal freedom remains unresolved: Even experts who support intervention worry about whether tech companies or governments should decide what constitutes healthy attention use, and if such oversight could lead to authoritarian control over how people think. While Hayes draws parallels to labor laws and environmental regulations, critics note that attention differs from these precedents because it’s harder to measure objectively and more tied to personal autonomy and freedom of thought. The most promising regulatory approaches may be incremental rather than comprehensive, focusing on transparency and choice rather than direct limits. Some scholars propose economic interventions like taxing attention costs or breaking up tech monopolies using metrics like “advertisement load” or “consumer time spent” as measures of market power—approaches that could address concerns about corporate profit extraction while avoiding the challenges of attention caps. |
Learn More About Improving Your Attention Span
To better understand how to improve your attention span, check out Shortform’s guides to the books we’ve referenced in this article:
