The economy of focus is broken. Here is how I stopped the spending leak.

Steve Jobs didn’t let his kids use iPads. Bill Gates wouldn’t let his children have phones until they were 14. Chamath Palihapitiya, the former VP of User Growth at Facebook, famously said, “I can control my kids’ decisions, which is that they’re not allowed to use that shit.”

When the dealer doesn’t smoke his own supply, you know the product is dangerous.

Yet, here we are. We complain that life is short, yet we act as if the scroll is eternal.

If I checked my bank account as often as I check my notifications, I’d be the most financially responsible person alive. But I don’t. Like you, I obsess over my money—I track subscriptions, hunt for deals, stress about inflation.

Yet when it comes to my attention—the one resource I can never get back—I spend it like a drunken sailor.

Dr. Gloria Mark at UC Irvine found that our average attention span on screens has collapsed to 47 seconds. But it’s worse than just “being distracted.” A study commissioned by HP found that workers distracted by email and phone calls saw a 10-point drop in IQ—twice the impact of smoking marijuana.

I wasn’t just “busy.” I was mechanically making myself stupider. I was mentally overdrawn.

So I ran an experiment. For 30 days, I treated my attention exactly like hard currency. I budgeted it. I audited it. I cut the bad investments.

Here is the receipt.

The Audit: Where Was I Bleeding?

Before I could fix anything, I had to see the damage. I tracked every time I unlocked my phone for a day.

I wasn’t being robbed. I was handing my wallet over to strangers.

• Transaction: 15 minutes on a Twitter thread about a movie I haven’t seen. ROI: Anger.

• Transaction: 22 minutes watching reels of people baking sourdough. ROI: Envy.

Tristan Harris, a former Google Design Ethicist, calls the smartphone a “slot machine” in your pocket. I realized I was pulling the lever 150 times a day, hoping for a dopamine jackpot that never arrived.

In money terms, I was buying a $10 latte every 20 minutes for 16 hours straight. I was broke, and it was my fault.

The New Budget (3 Rules)

1. The Morning Freeze (Asset Protection)

Rule: No screens before 10 AM. No email, no news, no texts. My attention stayed locked in a savings account until I had “paid myself first” by finishing my most important work task. As Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, predicted in 1971: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” I chose to stay poor in information so I could be rich in focus.

2. No Diversified Portfolios (Single-Tasking)

Rule: Writing? Phone in another room. Eating? TV off. Multitasking is a scam. It’s just paying a “transaction fee” every time you switch contexts. Research shows it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully regain focus after an interruption. I stopped paying the tax.

3. The Evening Vault

Rule: At 8 PM, the phone goes in a drawer. The bank is closed. It doesn’t open until morning.

The Market Crash (Withdrawal)

I won’t sugarcoat it. The first week was a depression.

The urge to check my phone wasn’t a habit—it was physical. My pocket vibrated when nothing was there. I felt bored. Disconnected. I felt the “poverty” of low stimulation.

If you’ve felt this, you’re not lazy. You’re not broken. You are fighting supercomputers designed by the smartest engineers on earth to hack your psychology. But around day seven, the market stabilized. My brain stopped begging for cheap dopamine hits. The itch faded.

The ROI After 30 Days

1. Compound Interest on Reading For years, I’d been a skimmer. I bought books but quit after chapter one. By week three, I finished a 300-page novel in three days. When you stop burning your focus on 15-second videos, your brain remembers how to make long-term investments.

2. The End of the “Switching Tax” Without constantly checking email, my days felt twice as long. I finished work by 2 PM because I wasn’t paying the “switching tax.” I became efficient simply by being cheap with my time.

3. I Stopped “Doom-Spending” Turns out, knowing everything happening in the world the second it happens is a bad investment. I cut the news. My clarity shot up. I stopped worrying about what I couldn’t control and focused on what I could: my work, my health, my family.

The Takeaway

Your attention is the only currency you can’t earn more of. You can always make more money. You can’t make more time.

If you feel scattered, behind, or overwhelmed—it’s not a time problem. It’s a spending problem.

You don’t need 30 days off the grid to feel this. Start small. Treat your focus like it’s gold. Guard it. Budget it. Stop letting the world pick your pocket.

The result isn’t just productivity. It’s the feeling that you finally own your life again.