London based entrepreneur, cybersecurity analyst doing a PhD in AI
Why you can’t stop scrolling – and how to stop.
Digital Ergonomics
Make Distraction Harder
We already understand physical ergonomics.
If a chair hurts your back, change the chair.
If a screen is too low, raise it.
If a workstation forces your body into an awkward position, redesign the workstation.
We do not normally tell people:
“Try harder not to feel pain.”
We change the environment.
The same idea should apply to attention.
That is the simplest way to understand digital ergonomics:
design your environment so that your brain has less unnecessary work to do.
Not more discipline.
Not another productivity app.
Not a complicated morning routine.
Less noise.
Less switching.
Less information arriving at the wrong time.
There is now a serious scientific basis for thinking this way. Neuroergonomics studies how the brain functions during real work and everyday activity, including attention, memory, decision-making and cognitive control.
The important shift is simple:
we spent decades making desks fit bodies. Now we need to make digital environments fit brains.
The Brain Has a Small Desk
The human brain is extraordinary.
Its active workspace is not.
Working memory is the temporary mental space we use to hold information while thinking.
Think of it as a small desk.
Put one document on it.
Fine.
Put another beside it.
Still manageable.
Now add:
an email,
a message,
a deadline,
something you must remember later,
and a colleague asking you a question.
The desk has not expanded.
It has become crowded.
That may be the first rule of cognitive ergonomics:
do not teach the brain to juggle more things. Put fewer things on its desk.
Multitasking Is Mostly Switching
This is where the idea of “multitasking” becomes misleading.
Erika Meins at ETH Zurich puts it simply:
“Multitasking is in fact an illusion.”
Her point is that what looks like simultaneous work is often a sequence of micro-interruptions: email, chat, meeting, phone, document, back to email. ETH Zurich also notes that remote work can make these interruptions easier to accumulate, especially when video meetings, notifications and parallel digital tasks overlap.
You may feel busy.
The brain may simply be switching rapidly.
And switching has a cost.
Attention Residue
Sophie Leroy gave that cost a useful name:
attention residue.
In her 2009 experiments, Leroy found that people often struggled to fully disengage from one unfinished task before beginning another. When part of the previous task remained mentally active, performance on the next task suffered.
This explains something most knowledge workers recognise immediately.
You are writing.
A message arrives.
You answer it.
You return to writing.
Your body is back at the document.
Your mind may not be.
Part of it is still inside the conversation you just left.
Later research by Leroy and Theresa Glomb found that a brief ready-to-resume plan can help. Before leaving an interrupted task, note where you were and what you will do next. This reduced attention residue in their studies.
One sentence may be enough:
Next: finish paragraph three and check the figures.
Then leave.
The brain no longer has to keep rehearsing the unfinished task in case you forget.
Even the Notification Can Be Enough
You do not need to open a notification for it to interrupt you.
The brain has already received a question:
Something happened.
Does it matter?
Should I look?
Attention has been spent before you decide whether the notification deserves it.
This gives us one of the simplest rules in this article:
the easiest notification to resist is the notification that never arrives.
Is Scrolling Really Rest?
A recent Scientific Reports study examined what happened after only fifteen minutes of passive Instagram scrolling.
One group scrolled through its own personalised Following feed.
A control group scrolled through comparatively neutral black-and-white nature material in a similar format.
Only twenty university students took part, so the study should not be exaggerated.
But the results were interesting.
After the scrolling period, the groups differed in changes to inhibitory-control performance. Researchers also observed different patterns of prefrontal activity in regions involved in working memory and response inhibition.
The researchers themselves stress what the study does not show.
It does not prove that fifteen minutes of Instagram “damages the brain”.
It does not tell us what happens after years.
But it raises a useful question:
when you finish scrolling, have you completely finished scrolling?
A personalised feed contains novelty.
Faces.
Opinions.
Emotion.
Social information.
Surprise.
Potential reward.
That may feel easier than working.
But easy is not necessarily restful.
Sometimes a better break is simply a gap.
Stand up.
Look outside.
Walk to the kitchen.
Do nothing for a minute.
No new information required.
The Most Interesting Intervention Was Subtraction
Some of the most useful recent research did not add another habit.
It removed something.
Calls still worked.
Texts still worked.
The internet remained available on computers.
But the phone stopped being an always-open doorway to the entire internet.
The intervention improved objectively measured sustained attention, subjective well-being and mental-health measures. Ninety-one per cent of participants improved on at least one of the three main outcomes. Participants also spent more time socialising face-to-face, exercising and being outdoors.
The important lesson is not that everyone should permanently disable mobile internet.
It is this:
subtraction can sometimes achieve what willpower cannot.
Instead of asking:
“How do I become better at resisting this?”
ask:
“Why is this being presented to me in the first place?”
Steve Jobs: Focus Means Saying No
Jony Ive once described Steve Jobs as:
“the most remarkably focused person I ever met in my life.”
But his explanation is more interesting than the compliment.
Jobs would ask him:
“How many things have you said no to?”
Ive explained that genuine focus could require refusing something you actually believed was an excellent idea because you had already chosen what deserved your attention.
That is a better definition of focus than:
concentrate harder.
Focus is largely exclusion.
One document instead of six.
One task instead of five.
No news alert.
No social-media badge.
No email appearing while you write.
Focus often begins with what is absent.
Elon Musk: Give Time a Purpose
Elon Musk has often been reported as organising parts of his workday into very small time blocks.
There is no reason everybody needs to copy five-minute scheduling.
The useful principle is much simpler:
give a period of time a purpose before it begins.
Writing time is for writing.
Email time is for email.
A meeting is for the meeting.
Lunch is lunch.
You do not need to control every minute.
You simply need fewer periods in which everything is allowed to happen at once.
The calendar can carry some of those decisions so the brain does not repeatedly have to remake them.
Meetings Need Ergonomics Too
Meetings are one of the easiest places for attention to disappear.
A virtual meeting may contain:
the meeting,
email beside it,
Teams underneath it,
and a phone on the desk.
That feels efficient.
It may simply be four competing attentional demands.
The solution can be very simple.
If a meeting deserves your presence, be present.
If you need to write emails throughout it, ask whether you needed the meeting at all.
Two half-done tasks do not necessarily equal one fully productive hour.
Let the Environment Remember
Cognitive science has another useful idea:
cognitive offloading.
It means moving some mental work into the environment so the brain no longer has to keep holding it internally.
Write something down.
Use a calendar.
Leave the document where you will need it.
Keep one short list.
That is not intellectual weakness.
It is good design.
Once something has been captured externally, working memory can stop repeating:
Remember this.
Remember this.
Remember this.
This is one reason I personally like using a fountain pen and paper.
I find writing with a fountain pen soothing in a way I do not find writing with a ballpoint pen soothing.
That is simply personal preference.
But paper has another advantage.
It has one job.
My notebook cannot suddenly display WhatsApp.
It cannot show breaking news.
It cannot recommend another video.
Sometimes good technology is technology that knows when to do less.
Technology Should Remove Work, Not Create More
Digital tools can still help.
But they should reduce cognitive load rather than become another source of it.
Tools such as Erasys WhiteMatter are designed around this idea: helping make digital multitasking, divided attention and task-switching more visible so organisations and individuals can reduce unnecessary cognitive friction rather than simply asking people to “focus harder”.
That gives us a useful test for any digital-wellbeing tool:
Does this remove cognitive work—or create more of it?
If an app interrupts you ten times a day to tell you that you should concentrate, it may have misunderstood the problem.
Islam: Attention Has a Hierarchy
Islam adds something important.
Attention is not valuable merely because focused people produce more work.
Some things deserve more attention than others.
One Qur’anic verse captures that hierarchy beautifully:
“[They are] people whom neither trade nor sale distracts from the remembrance of Allah and the establishment of prayer…”
The balance matters.
Trade continues.
Work continues.
Business continues.
The problem is not activity.
It is displacement.
Something lower should not continually push something higher off the brain’s desk.
Prayer Is Already Built Into the Day
There is an authentic hadith about a man who entered the mosque and prayed too quickly.
When he finished, the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ told him:
“Go back and pray, for you have not prayed.”
Eventually the man asked to be taught.
The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ told him to bow until he became settled, rise until settled, prostrate until settled, and sit until settled.
The hadith is principally about performing prayer correctly, especially ṭumaʾnīnah—calmness and proper settling in each posture.
But the image feels strikingly modern.
Stop.
Settle.
Then move.
Prayer does not need to become another productivity hack.
It is worship.
But precisely because it is worship, it creates something our digital lives increasingly lack:
a real stopping point.
Five times during the day, the current stream of activity loses its absolute claim over you.
The email can wait.
The feed can wait.
The unfinished document can wait.
You stand before Allah.
Then you return.
Personal Attention Ergonomics
There is already an academic field called cognitive neuroergonomics.
For ordinary life, I would use a simpler term:
Personal Attention Ergonomics
The goal is not to become stronger than distraction.
It is to design the environment so there is less distraction to fight.
And there is only one framework to remember:
CLEAR
C — Cut what arrives
Turn off what you do not need.
News alerts.
Marketing.
Social-media notifications.
Unnecessary badges.
In an open-plan office, use the quieter space when you need to read, write or think deeply.
At home, let the phone live somewhere other than beside the keyboard.
Do this once. Benefit every day.
L — Leave one thing visible
Make the current task dominant.
Writing?
Keep the document open.
Reading?
Keep the book open.
Analysing?
Keep the spreadsheet visible.
Minimise the rest.
You do not need an empty life.
You need an uncluttered working moment.
E — Externalise the rest
Keep one capture place.
Paper is enough.
If another task enters your mind, write it down instead of doing it.
If you must leave unfinished work, leave yourself one sentence:
Next: finish section three and check the data.
Then return later.
That combines cognitive offloading with Leroy and Glomb’s “ready-to-resume” principle.
A — Allow a reset
Do not fill every pause with new information.
After difficult work, leave a little empty space.
Stand up.
Walk.
Look outside.
For Muslims, the five prayers already provide natural resets.
Stop.
Settle.
Pray.
Then return.
R — Remove the biggest leak
For one ordinary working period, notice what interrupts you most.
Not every interruption.
Just the biggest source.
Teams?
Email?
Phone?
Office conversation?
Household chores?
Remove or reduce that one source first.
Then stop measuring.
The purpose is not to become excellent at tracking distraction.
It is to remove the reason you needed to track it.
That is CLEAR.
Cut what arrives.
Leave one thing visible.
Externalise the rest.
Allow a reset.
Remove the biggest leak.
Do not keep asking:
How can I become stronger than distraction?
Ask:
Why am I making my brain fight this battle at all?
A good chair does not demand a stronger spine.
Good digital ergonomics should not demand heroic attention.
Let the notebook remember.
Let the calendar remember.
Let software reduce switching rather than create more of it.
Let unnecessary notifications never arrive.
Let prayer interrupt the noise.
And leave the small desk inside the mind with enough empty space to do what it was designed to do:
think clearly about the thing that matters now.
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