First Light
You don't lose focus when the phone buzzes. You lose it an hour earlier, when you start waiting for it to.
CÈ
Your life, one week at a time
Each dot is a single week. The Stoics kept death in view not to despair, but to spend the squares that remain.
It sounds like a complaint about notifications. It is a complaint about the waiting.
Take the hour you blocked for the hard thing: the proposal, the spreadsheet, the chapter. The phone sits face down, silent, and still half your mind is on it. Is the client going to reply? Did the supplier confirm? The buzz never comes, and the hour is gone anyway.
That is the cost the line names. Attention does not leave when something interrupts it. It leaves when part of you is posted at the door, listening for the interruption.
Researchers who study this call the leftover pull "attention residue", the bit of your mind still stuck on the last open task after you have moved to the next. An unanswered message works the same way, even if you never touch it. One open loop can tax the whole hour.
So the fix is not a stricter phone. Close the loop first. Reply to the client with "Thursday, I'll send it by noon." Ask the supplier for a yes or no by five. Write the one line that tells the waiting part of your mind it is off duty.
Then take the hour, 9:00 to 10:00, and spend all of it on the hard thing.
A silent phone only helps if you have stopped listening to it.