The Age of Smartphones is also The Age of Interrupting Notifications. It used to be only phone calls or text messages, and maybe emails, used to be able to interrupt you with their. Nowadays, your messenger apps, your virtual farm, the fitness tracker you’re wearing, your newspaper, or your photography app gets to interrupt your day with a ding and the promise of some morsel of information for you to peruse, plus a small shot of dopamine to keep your pleasure center going.

Some of these interruptions are well-intentioned, or even welcome. Your fitness app might want you to get up and walk a few steps, or a friend letting you know that they’d love to go to dinner with you tonight. But these apps still have to be careful if their notifications aren’t caused by other humans: Activity Trackers Don’t Always Work the Way We Want Them To, because constant nagging to do something good for you might turn you off doing it.

Most notifications, however, are either offered without much thought (“we should notify our users of everything”), or worse, engineered to have you react in a way that the app maker can control and benefit from. Most social media apps, for example, will send you a notification whenever something interesting happens; whether this is actually interesting or even relevant to you is of less importance than making sure you keep using their apps, and don’t stop to think about what you’re doing right now opening Facebook: When habit-forming products become addictive.

What those apps are trading in is your attention. Attention would be one of the most valuable resources if it were traded on an exchange. Your attention can be measured and quantified, and the price for your attention is whatever advertisers are willing to pay for it. Consequently, Facebook et al. knows exactly how hard they should try to keep your attention on their platforms (hint: as much as possible): Tech Companies Design Your Life, Here’s Why You Should Care.

This is a problem. It’s a problem for you, because you might not want to spend all your attention in one place. Surfing Facebook doesn’t really pay the bills, whereas Facebook can make a pretty penny from your surfing. Even worse, the attention you freely gave to Facebook might’ve been invested better in other activities. You might have worked a bit more to make sure you earn more money, or spent it with friends and family, something that is much more satisfying than viewing their posts on Facebook. So the solution might be as simple as to Turn Off Your Push Notifications. All of Them.

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Hurry Slowly is a new and really great podcast about the never-ending need to hurry, and why slowing down will actually get you there. I can especially recommend episode 1 (Jason Fried – Whose Schedule Are You On?), episode 4 (Kim Chambers – Calculated Risk, Stretch Goals, and Sharks), and episode 7 (Scott Belsky – Quick Decisions vs Wise Decisions).