Protect your notification space. This is my #1 tip for managing time and attention.

My goal is to to only get notifications for things that require my timely action or awareness. Everything else needs to be out of my notifications, especially marketing and news. Unfortunately, enforcing this is a continuous job.

I want to talk about why I think this is critically important and then some concrete strategies I apply.

Attention is all you have

On some level, the core scarcity of our lives is our spare attention–especially our high-quality attention. Everything we have to do to live requires attention, and then we’ve got leftover attention for recreation. We often think of this in terms of time, but if you’ve had the experience of having time but not the mental bandwidth for something, that’s an example of how your attention is actually even more limited than your time.

Technology can give us more attention by automating and simplifying things that we have to do to exist. But the story of the Web is also the ways in which our attention is commoditization and sold to the highest bidder, in subtle ways. It’s easy to simply let this happen, but we don’t have to.

How I protect myself

People are coming up with ever more creative ways to insert things into my notification space, but here are some of the actions I take to control it:

• Disabling push notifications that aren’t alerts. I’m on Android, so I do this by tapping and holding on unwanted notifications to get to the settings for the app.

• Unsubscribing from marketing emails. Use that unsubscribe button! Sometimes, there are things I do want to keep up with, like concerts. But it’s better to set up alerts proactively than accept everything that every vendor wants to send me.

• Forwarding newsletters to a news reader app. This way I’m in control of when I want to put my attention on this content. I use Feedbin and I create filters in Gmail to push newsletters out of my inbox. Or make a Gmail account with no notifications for your newsletters.

• Within social media apps, tuning the feed and in-app notification settings. Unfortunately, many of these apps provide limited control.

• Aggressively unsubscribing from unsolicited text messages with STOP and blocking. I’m finding Android’s default messaging app is also pretty good at keeping spam out of my notifications.

Just do it

It’s tempting to not bother with all of this. The cost may feel manageable, but paid every single day, it is substantial. I can’t tell you how good it feels to have an inbox and notification panel that only have things that require my attention. I promise it will not just make you more productive, but you will feel better, too.