Your attention is finite resource.  You must decide how to spend your attention wisely.  Media, both valuable and distracting, is increasingly plentiful and easily accessible.  Certain technologies empower users to make these choices, and certain technologies are designed to inhibit the users’ agency, to varying degrees, either through restricting certain actions or prodding the user, covertly or overtly, to act in a certain way.

Respect your attention, respect your autonomy.  Put yourself back in control of how you spend your time and attention.  Opt out of the attention economy.

 

 

Rely on self-curation over algorithmic curation.  Curating your own content feed is the only way to ensure you only see what you want to see, and avoid the excessively distracting and provocative.

Avoid apps and websites with infinite scroll.  Infinite scroll is a trick to induce FOMO by pretending that there is always more attention-worthy media out there; however, there is only so much media that is relevant and attention worthy to any individual person.

Use attention respecting reading and curation apps.  Reading apps that will always hold onto unread content to let you access content whenever you decide.

Don’t use technology that encourages surface level reaction.  Tapping or clicking a button isn’t a meaningful interaction.  Writing a response or reply is.  Don’t mistake interaction with connection.