Look around your screen right now. It’s okay, we’ll wait.

At this very moment, applications are fighting for your attention. Between chat windows, Finder windows, Web browser windows, and everything else, it’s amazing any of us can concentrate at all. As it has become easier to multitask, we’ve become more likely to have two dozen windows on the screen at any given moment. Innovations like Expose makes finding what you want in the sea of visual stimuli easier, but they’ve done little to remove those distractions.

Focusing takes concentration, and concentration takes energy. You can only concentrate on so much at a time, and you can’t create more energy. What we need to do is change how we work.

Let’s limit our attention to one application—any application—at any time. Let’s make it easy to change focus when we have to. Let’s allow ourselves to bring other apps up quickly if we need them, but put them out of sight again just as quickly.

Let’s rediscover how to focus, and get back to thinking.