-We've also created cultures where we feel that we need to respond to messages we've received the moment we receive them. I'd argue that most of the messages you receive during the day don't warrant the attention you're giving them, and certainly not the sort of attention that warrants stopping what you're doing in order to view and respond to them. You may be better served by batching the periods where you check your messages as infrequently as you can. Some folks recommend two or three times a day, but even limiting yourself to checking messages once an hour can make a vast improvement compared with the number of times you're already checking your messages. You'll need to judge how often you check your messages based on your needs and your work culture. Also consider the person you're responding to. Does it make sense to give this person a quick, semi-thought-out response or does this message require more time to simmer in your mind before you respond? Giving yourself time to think about a problem may give you insights into a problem that aren't readily apparent in the moment. This could mean the difference between one well thought out response and a deluge of half-thought-out brainstorming via your messaging application. Responding to everything as it's received is very stressful and requires huge amounts of attention that could be better placed on your programming work.
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-It may seem challenging and foreign to live without notifications and without the need to respond to everything message and notification. But if we value our attention and our focused sessions of programming enough then it becomes necessary to give ourselves as much of that as we can.
+It may seem challenging and foreign to live without notifications and without the need to respond to every message and notification, but our attention is finite and limited. Maintaining focus throughout the day is challenging and stressful. If we can limit the number of distractions we receive throughout the day we then give ourselves the freedom to not have to work as hard to keep our attention attuned to our programming tasks. We get to say "not right now" to our distractions and handle them at a more appropriate time.