What Returned

For years, like most people, I accepted notifications, messaging apps and social media as a normal part of modern life.

A message arrived, I looked at my phone. A notification appeared, I responded. A few spare minutes became scrolling. None of it felt unusual because everyone around me was doing the same thing.

Eventually, I began to question something very simple:

Who was deciding where my attention went?

I realised that much of my day was being interrupted by things I had not consciously chosen to engage with. The phone had gradually moved from being a tool I used intentionally to something that continuously requested my attention.

So I began removing the noise.

There was more silence. More uninterrupted thought. More awareness of what I was doing. More space to think about my family, my work, my company, the institutions I wanted to build and, more fundamentally, the kind of person I wanted to become.

That experience changed the way I began looking at software.

I started asking different questions.

• Why should a product notify a person simply because something happened?
• Why should software measure success by how many times a user returns?
• Why should an application attempt to occupy more of a person’s day?
• Why should a principal spend hours looking at dashboards?
• Why should a teacher spend valuable time feeding information into systems when that information could be captured automatically?
• Why should technology created to help human beings eventually demand so much of their attention?

I came to a simple conclusion:

Software should be a tool for human intention. Human attention should never become the raw material of the product.

This does not mean technology is harmful, nor does it mean everyone should abandon social platforms or messaging applications.

It means that people should remain conscious of the relationship they have with technology.

And those of us who build technology have an even greater responsibility.

Every notification we create, every workflow we design, every metric we optimise and every automated decision we introduce changes human behaviour in some small way.

That responsibility should not be taken lightly.

This realisation can become a foundation for how systems are designed.

When we build software for educational institutions, the goal should not be to make principals, teachers, students and administrators spend more time inside the product.

The goal should be the opposite.

That is the kind of software worth building.