Stop Apologizing for Doing Your Actual Job
Why Protecting Your Attention Matters
It’s 10 AM. You’ve been “working” for two hours, but your most significant accomplishment is answering twelve Slack messages and attending a standup that could’ve been an email. The feature you were supposed to ship this week? Still zero commits.
You know you need to focus. You know context switching is killing your productivity. But there’s this nagging guilt every time you see those notification badges piling up. What if someone needs you? What if you’re being a bad team player? What if ignoring that ping makes you look like you don’t care?
That guilt is misplaced urgency, and it’s destroying your ability to do meaningful work.
The Real Cost of Scattered Attention
Seneca observed that people who are everywhere are really nowhere, constantly busy at accomplishing nothing meaningful. That Slack message mid-deep work, the email that derails your debugging session, the meeting that fragments your afternoon into useless 20-minute chunks—this isn’t just productivity loss. It’s a form of self-violence, scattering your mind until you can’t recognize your own thoughts.
Each context switch costs about 15-20 minutes of recovery time. Not the seconds it takes to check Slack, but the cognitive reload required to rebuild your mental model. Think about that. Every ping, every “quick question,” every notification you respond to immediately, you’re not losing seconds, you’re hemorrhaging 15-20 minutes of focused work.
You can be busy for 40 years and accomplish less than somebody with focused months. The Stoics understood this: attention is the only currency that matters, and modern work culture has us throwing it away like it’s unlimited.
Your brain literally cannot process two complex tasks simultaneously. What we call multitasking is just rapid context switching, and you’re doing it poorly. What’s the point of starting two or three different things at the same time if you can’t finish them? Or worse, if you just do them half-assed?
Why We Keep Doing This to Ourselves
The guilt is real. Someone pings you, and you feel that immediate pressure to respond. Not because it’s actually urgent, but because we’ve been trained to treat every notification like a fire alarm.
But here’s what that really is: other people’s poor planning becoming your emergency.
Those interruptions? They’re rarely as urgent as they feel. Most of the time, they can wait an hour. Or three hours. Or until tomorrow. But we’ve convinced ourselves that being responsive means being reactive, that being available means being always-on.
I remember a time before we had the internet, before cell phones, before instant notifications. You could get lost in your work, lost in whatever you were doing, and there was really no way for anybody to get a hold of you. And you know what? The world didn’t end. People figured it out. They waited.
The Stoic Solution: Own Your Time
The Stoic practice of protecting your attention starts with recognizing it’s finite and non-renewable—more precious than time itself. When it’s time to work, that’s the thing you need to focus on.
That means shutting off Slack notifications. Closing your email client. Setting your status to “Do Not Disturb” without apologizing for it.
These are things I actually do. I’ll shut off notifications, close distractions, and just focus on whatever the task is. Getting it done. If you really need me, there are ways to get a hold of me, but is it really that necessary? Probably not.
Set boundaries around deep work:
Do not disturb mode isn’t rude, it’s professional
Block your calendar for focus time
Make communication async-first by default
Batch your communication:
Check Slack three times daily instead of 300 times
You can be responsive without being reactive
Processing messages in batches is more efficient anyway
Preserve your flow state:
Quality attention on one problem for two hours outperforms fragmented attention on five problems for eight
Stoicism values depth over breadth
That deep work session where you actually solve the problem? That’s what you’re here for
What This Looks Like in Practice
When I go out in the morning for a run, I leave my phone in my vehicle. It’s just me out there. First thing in the morning, nobody’s going to bother you at 6:30 AM anyway, but I keep my phone away so I’m not distracted by emails or LinkedIn notifications or whatever. I can just focus on the run.
Same thing with deep work sessions. I’ll focus on getting tasks done for solid blocks, then spend 15-20 minutes checking and getting caught up on things before going back. Rinse and repeat.
Just because we’re always connected doesn’t mean we always have to stay connected. We can choose to disconnect. There’s nothing wrong with disconnecting, I actually recommend it.
Stop Feeling Guilty
Here’s what you need to internalize: there’s no sense feeling guilty about protecting your attention. To do your best work, you have to focus. Without focus, you’re just scattered, and what are you really accomplishing? You’re being busy for the sake of being busy but not actually accomplishing anything.
The work you’re doing is important. Your time matters. If other people need you, they can wait. That’s not being selfish or a bad teammate, that’s understanding what your job actually is.
You weren’t hired to respond to Slack messages instantly. You were hired to solve problems, write code, ship features. Everything else is just noise trying to convince you it’s signal.
So own your time. Set those boundaries. Turn off those notifications. And when that guilt creeps in, remind yourself: the person who suffers most from your scattered attention is you, and the work you’re supposed to be doing deserves better than your fragmented leftovers.
Quote of the Day:
“People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.” - Seneca
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