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Ethan James Caldwell Is Betting the Next Great Technology Companies Will Compete for Less of Your Attention

Ethan James Caldwell

For years, the technology industry has operated under a remarkably consistent assumption: more engagement is better. More minutes spent inside an application. More sessions per day. More notifications opened. More content consumed. More reasons to return. Entire product teams have been built around improving those numbers. Ethan James Caldwell believes the next generation of successful technology companies may need to rethink them. Caldwell is an Austin-based technology entrepreneur, product designer and author who founded Northlight around a decidedly different proposition: technology should help people accomplish what matters without demanding more of their attention than necessary. It sounds simple. In practice, it challenges one of the most established business models of the digital era. Caldwell’s work raises a question bigger than screen time or productivity. It is whether technology companies can create substantial value by competing to give users something back. The Business Model Behind Attention Attention has quietly become one of the world’s most valuable commodities. Many digital businesses do not charge users directly for every interaction. Instead, their economics depend on attracting an audience, retaining that audience, and converting attention into advertising revenue, subscriptions, transactions, or data. That naturally shapes product design. When additional engagement creates additional economic value, companies have an incentive to make their products difficult to leave. Infinite scrolling removes stopping points. Notifications create reasons to return. Recommendation engines eliminate the need to decide what to consume next. Autoplay turns one piece of content into another. Individually, these features can be useful. Together, they have helped create a digital environment where capturing attention is an industry. Caldwell came to the problem from inside product design. After studying Art & Design at the University of Michigan’s Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, he spent roughly a decade working in consumer product design. That experience placed him close to the decisions that influence how people interact with software. It also led him toward a question that eventually became central to his work: What happens when the metrics that make a product successful are not necessarily the same metrics that make a user’s life better? Building Northlight Around a Different Metric Caldwell founded Northlight in Austin in 2021. The company is built around digital wellbeing and intentional technology use, but Caldwell’s broader philosophy is not anti-technology. It is almost the opposite. He believes technology is powerful enough to improve people’s lives without having to occupy every available moment of their lives. Northlight was created around the idea that people should be able to understand their digital habits, protect periods of sustained concentration and make more intentional decisions about where their attention goes. That creates an unusual product-design challenge. Traditional engagement products frequently ask: How do we get the user to come back? A product designed around attention may instead need to ask: How quickly can we help the user accomplish what they came here to do? Those questions lead to very different products. They may eventually lead to different businesses, too. The Rise of the Attention-Conscious Consumer Consumer expectations around technology are changing. For much of the smartphone era, convenience dominated the conversation. Consumers wanted faster access, more connectivity, more content, and more functionality. Technology delivered all four. But abundance created a second-order problem. When practically everything is available instantly, deciding what deserves attention gets harder. Email competes with messaging apps. Messaging apps compete with social media. Social media competes with streaming platforms. News competes with podcasts. Work software competes with all of them. Artificial intelligence is likely to increase the amount of information available rather than decrease it. That means the scarce resource of the next decade may not be information. It may be the human capacity to process it. This is where Caldwell sees an opportunity. If the previous generation of digital products competed primarily on access and engagement, the next generation may also compete on restraint. Products could distinguish themselves by interrupting users less, simplifying decisions, filtering unnecessary information, and helping people complete tasks with fewer interactions. In that environment, respecting attention stops being merely a wellness position. It becomes a product strategy. Why Focus Has Economic Value Caldwell develops this argument further in his book, The Attention Dividend: How to Stop Spending Your Focus and Start Investing It. The underlying idea is that attention behaves somewhat like capital. You can spend it on things that disappear immediately, or invest it in activities that can produce longer-term returns. Consider the difference between responding to a series of low-priority notifications and spending the same hour developing a new business strategy. Both consume time. They do not create equal value. The same principle applies to writing, learning, product development, creative work and complex problem solving. The most valuable activities in knowledge-based industries frequently require uninterrupted thought. That creates a strange contradiction inside many modern workplaces. Organizations hire talented people to solve difficult problems, then place them in communication environments optimized for constant interruption. Slack messages arrive. Emails appear. Meetings divide calendars into increasingly small blocks. Smartphones fill whatever gaps remain. Employees can stay busy all day while having remarkably little uninterrupted time to do the work they were hired to do. Caldwell’s attention framework suggests that this is not merely a productivity issue. It is an allocation problem. The Hidden Cost of Interruption Businesses typically measure costs they can easily see. Payroll is measurable. Software subscriptions are measurable. Office space is measurable. The cost of fragmented attention is harder to place on a spreadsheet. Yet its effects can appear everywhere. A designer repeatedly pulled away from a project may take longer to solve a problem. An executive moving continuously between notifications may spend less time thinking about strategy. A writer switching between documents, messages, and browser tabs may produce weaker work despite spending more hours at a computer. The individual interruption may seem trivial. The accumulated effect is not. This distinction is important because productivity advice often places responsibility entirely on the individual. Turn off notifications. Put the phone away. Use a timer. Exercise more