It's The Attention Economy, Stupid.

The attention economy has true scientific basis in the fact that every day, the brain has a limited amount of energy to put towards the things we choose to do and think about. Up to the internet age, we never struggled with the amount of information coming in. There used to be a lack of information, so the general message was that we needed to seek more information, and once we found it, we could deal with it quite easily with the amount of "concentration fuel" we have.

Now, we have too much information, so the task has changed. If we took note of all the communications we received we would soon be overwhelmed.

Thrivers manage their attention economy carefully. The graph shows how the lower end of the scale, things like texts and tweets, are more like sugary snacks. They lack long term value, being rarely memorable and requiring little thought on the part of the writer or receiver. They are unlikely to have true value in anyone's life and we are better off strictly limiting the extent to which they are allowed to interfere with our day.

Every time a text or similar electronic message arrives, it asks us to interrupt our attention. This is an expensive process for the mind: every time the mind has to shift attention sets, energy is expended, and the more we do it, the less mental energy we have to spend for the rest of the day. This is why being absorbed with these things can completely take over a person's attention, leaving them preoccupied and unavailable to the people around them.

Paying attention, then, really is an amount we pay: as with all things we pay for, we must manage our budget wisely.