notifications are making you poor and stupid

As I’m jumping into leading, organizing and focusing my own world the origins of distraction are becoming abundantly clear. It now seams pretty silly to leave Facebook or Twitter open all the time on my computer - same with email - but when you are unfocused those timely updates can fake their way into our urgency thinking. And our phones are filled with 100 times more distractions with rapidly decreasing value for any of them!

As I’m trying to create, lead, and breath my own air in my work I am realizing how attention damaging all the notifications and alerts on my phone have become. Attention is the #1 most valuable thing anyone of us has - it’s what David Allen, Stephen Covey, Scott Belsky and Seth Godin have all been trying to tell us! So why do we waste it on so many unimportant - fake urgent things?

If we all had a nickel for every lament of the distractions in our world, we’d be as rich as we’d be if we simply turned them off and focused on our passions adequately.

Here is what I’m doing now:

When I’m at a meal, at my desk, or driving I leave my phone facing down. I still want to review updates when it’s a good time - but that is not all the time.
I’m now militantly only checking email and social inboxes a couple times a day. There is literally no reason to check them any more often then that for productivity reasons. Only my ADD reasons would need more then that.
Using Lion’s Full Screen - a lot. The same focus that comes from the iPhone or iPad in content creation is perfect for working in OSX Lion on the Mac. Yes, sometimes you are assembling and coordinating digital logisitics needing multiple app windows open. But it terms of creating value that is rarely what you need your computer to look like.
Finally, paper is the thinking medium for me, the computer the doing medium. If I try to “think” through things on the computer it’s like trying to think in an Arcade. There are too many “shiny’s” to go to.

For those of you with the weight of producing “the” value for your world, owning your own business, leading your own cause, how do you squeeze the value out of each day keep your attention focused?