Building a productivity product made me rethink “digital detox”: the real issue may be unstructured attention

I have been thinking about the digital detox trend from a builder’s perspective.

Searches for “how to digital detox” are reportedly up 110% this year. Searches around “touch grass,” adult tennis lessons, trail running, hiking, running clubs, and meeting people nearby are rising too.

At first, this seems ironic.

We build software. We use software to market software. Many of us spend most of our working days inside browser tabs. And then, after hours, we search for ways to escape the exact environment we helped create.

But maybe “digital detox” is not really about rejecting technology.

Maybe it is about reclaiming attention from systems designed to fill every empty second.

A phone is useful when it helps you book a class, call a friend, navigate a trail, or remember an important commitment. It becomes draining when it converts every small pause into a feed, an alert, an argument, a comparison, or a tiny hit of information with no real endpoint.

As founders, we should probably ask harder questions about the products we build:

• Does this product help a person take action, or just give them another place to consume?

• Is the key metric “time in app,” even when more time does not improve the user’s life?

• Are notifications solving a user problem, or serving our retention dashboard?

• Are we helping people make plans, or merely helping them postpone making plans?

• Can a digital product create a path back to the physical world?

I do not think the answer is “make every product less engaging.” That would be simplistic and, frankly, not always useful.

But I do think there is a difference between engagement and momentum.

A person who spends 40 minutes watching productivity content may feel productive. A person who spends two minutes setting a concrete plan, then leaves the phone behind and goes for a run, has actually moved.

That distinction shapes how I think about Focido, the social accountability app we are building. We are trying to make the digital part short and purposeful: set a goal, get support from another human, follow through in the real world. The ideal outcome is not someone endlessly browsing a productivity feed. It is someone closing the app because they are going to do the thing.

Here are a few practical lessons I am taking from this:

1. Design for exits, not only returns.
   A healthy product can help a user leave the screen with a clear next action.

2. Make intentions concrete.
   “Exercise more” does not compete well with a feed. “Join the 6 p.m. running group on Thursday” does.

3. Use social accountability carefully.
   Another person knowing your plan can help you follow through. But it should feel supportive, never like surveillance or public shame.

4. Respect quiet.
   Not every product needs to interrupt people. Notification controls and quiet hours are not boring settings. They are a statement about who owns the user’s attention.

5. Measure whether people do the real-world thing.
   For products built around habits, productivity, and motivation, time spent in the app can be a misleading success metric.

I am curious how other founders see this.

Are we entering a phase where the best digital products are the ones that make us less dependent on digital products? Or is that just another nice-sounding story we tell ourselves while opening another tab?

If you are building in productivity, wellness, community, or education: how do you decide when engagement is helping and when it is simply consuming attention?

Disclosure: I am building Focido, a social accountability app. I am sharing this as a product-design question rather than a launch announcement.