Simon wrote that in 1971, as an economist, decades before anyone had a feed. He was not complaining about noise. He was naming a price.

Information is never free to the person who takes it in. It gets paid for in the one currency nobody can print more of: the reader's attention.

That breaks the habit founders are proudest of. Keeping up feels like work — three newsletters on the MRT from Tampines to Raffles Place, a thread about a competitor's raise, an AI summary of a report you will never open.

Each one arrives feeling like an asset, and each one is a withdrawal.

The account is the same one the real work draws on. By the time you sit down to fix the pricing page or call the customer who went quiet, the best hour of the day is gone, spent in small coins on other people's news.

AI makes the arithmetic worse. Information now costs almost nothing to produce, so it will keep arriving without limit, and Simon's line gets truer with every model that ships.

Run the count on this morning: every input you opened before the first thing you made. If you lose count, that is the answer.

A better filter will not save you, because filtering still spends attention deciding what to skip.

The order is the fix: make first, read after.

So today, the first ninety minutes go to one piece of work that did not exist yesterday. Nothing opened, nothing summarised, nothing checked; the news will keep until eleven.

Stay uninformed until then. It is the richest you will be all day.