The longer version of this post’s title was supposed to be:

Where to keep my smartphone while researching companies – How I learned to stop worrying about my notifications & love my work.

Well, it was never meant to be perfect.

Now that I’ve lost your attention, let me bring it back to something much more important.

I’ve always wondered why people used the phrase ‘pay attention’. Why ‘pay’? Why not just ‘give’ attention. Certainly it conveys the same intent. I think it makes a lot of sense when we think of it as a metaphor. We are in a sense, literally paying with our mind’s cognitive capacity to focus on something when we are paying attention.