Focus on a Mac: a timer in the notch, and fewer interruptions

Most advice about focus is about willpower: try harder, turn things off, be disciplined. The research on interruptions points somewhere more useful. The problem is not that people are weak. It is that the setup around them keeps pulling them away, and each pull costs more than it seems.

This post looks at what that research actually says, then turns it into practical changes for anyone working on a Mac, including a few that use the MacBook notch.

What the research says about interruptions

Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, has studied attention at work for about twenty years. A few of her findings are worth knowing.

In a 2004 field study with Victor González, she and her team shadowed information workers and found they switched between tasks roughly every few minutes, and spent only around ten minutes on a project before moving to another. Work was not a line; it was constant fragments.

In a 2008 lab study, The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress, Mark, Daniela Gudith and Ulrich Klocke found something counterintuitive. People who were interrupted finished their tasks just as well, and even faster. But they reported significantly more stress, frustration, time pressure and effort. We compensate for interruptions by rushing, and pay for it in strain.

Mark has also described, in interviews about her work, that it can take on the order of twenty minutes to get back to an interrupted task, often because people pass through other tasks on the way back. And in her 2023 book Attention Span, she reports that the average time people spend on one screen before switching has fallen to under a minute in her more recent studies.

A related idea comes from Sophie Leroy, whose 2009 paper coined the term attention residue. When you switch from task A to task B, part of your attention stays on A, especially if A was left unfinished. So even a quick check has an after-effect on whatever you do next.

Put together: interruptions do not just cost the seconds they take. They cost stress and a period of reduced attention afterwards. Reducing the number of switches is worth more than making each one faster.

The hidden interruptions on a Mac

Notifications are the obvious culprit, but they are not the only one. Many interruptions are self-inflicted checks:

• Switching to the calendar to see when the next meeting is.
• Opening the music app to skip a song.
• Opening a timer to see how long is left.
• Checking whether a long build, download or coding agent is finished.

Each one is small. Each one takes you out of the window you were in, and puts something new in front of you: an email, a message, a tab. That is how a ten-second check becomes ten minutes.

The fix for this kind is not willpower either. It is putting the answer where you can see it without switching.

Why a visible timer helps

The Pomodoro Technique, developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s, is the best known timer method: work for 25 minutes, take a short break, and take a longer one after four rounds. The exact numbers matter less than the structure. A timer turns "I should focus" into "I am focusing until 10:25", which is a much easier promise to keep.

Where the timer lives matters. A timer in a separate window gets buried. A timer on your phone brings your phone into view, which brings everything on it. A timer at the top of the screen, in view but out of the way, gives a quiet sense of how much is left without inviting a check.

That is what the notch is good for. It is right next to where you already look for the time, it does not cover your work, and a small countdown there is easy to read at a glance.

Practical changes that help

1. Use macOS Focus for the loud stuff

In System Settings, under Focus, you can set up a mode that silences notifications except from the people and apps you choose. You can schedule it, or turn it on from Control Center. Start with a simple "Work" focus that allows only your calendar and the one or two people who genuinely need to reach you.

2. Put the things you check in one glanceable place

For each of the checks above, find a way to see the answer without switching. The time until your next meeting, what is playing, the time left on a timer, whether a task is done. A notch app can hold all of these. So can careful use of widgets. The point is: no window switch.

3. Batch the pings

Leroy's attention residue is worst when you switch away from an unfinished task. So let messages wait until a natural break, like the end of a timer, instead of answering them as they arrive. A focus session with a clear end makes that easier to stick to.

4. Build in real breaks

The 20-20-20 rule, often recommended for digital eye strain, is easy to remember: every 20 minutes, look at something about 20 feet (6 metres) away for 20 seconds. Stand up now and then. Drink some water. These are better done on a gentle schedule than when you finally notice you are tired, and they should never interrupt a focus session.

5. Let long-running work tell you when it is done

If you run builds, renders or AI coding agents, the worst habit is checking on them. Set them up to tell you when they finish or need input, and then stop checking. Our guide to Claude Code notifications covers this for coding agents.

How we use the notch for this

We built these ideas into Crowny. You start a focus session from the notch, and the countdown sits in the collapsed notch while you work. While it runs, Crowny holds its own nudges. Water, stand and 20-20-20 eye-break reminders come on a gentle schedule, and never during focus. Your next meeting, what is playing and every coding agent's state are in the same place, so the usual checks do not need a window switch.

If you want to try it, download Crowny or see what a licence includes. And if you are new to the notch, our guide to using the MacBook notch is a good place to start.

Sources

• González, V. M. and Mark, G. (2004). "Constant, constant, multi-tasking craziness": managing multiple working spheres. Proceedings of CHI 2004.
• Mark, G., Gudith, D. and Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress. Proceedings of CHI 2008.
• Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2).
• Mark, G. (2023). Attention Span. Hanover Square Press.