One look at an email can rob you of 15 minutes of focus. One call

Host: The room glowed with the cold light of screens. A dozen digital clocks blinked from the walls — each showing a different city, a different timezone, a different pulse. The windows reflected only blue light and silhouettes. Outside, the city hummed with the restless electricity of the 21st century — the sound of notifications, cars, and distraction.

Host: Jack sat at his desk, surrounded by the detritus of modern life: two laptops, a tablet, three phones, and a half-drunk coffee that had gone cold hours ago. Jeeny stood by the window, her arms crossed, her face lit intermittently by the flash of the neon signs below. Between them, a quote glowed on Jack’s main screen — crisp, white, and uncomfortably true:

“One look at an email can rob you of 15 minutes of focus. One call on your cell phone, one tweet, one instant message can destroy your schedule, forcing you to move meetings, or blow off really important things, like love, and friendship.”
— Jacqueline Leo

Jeeny: “You’ve been staring at that same line for ten minutes,” she said softly.

Jack: “I know,” he murmured, not looking up. “The irony isn’t lost on me.”

Jeeny: “You look like a man drowning in signals.”

Jack: “I am. We all are.”

Host: The buzz of his phone vibrated against the desk — a small, urgent tremor that sliced through the quiet like a blade. He didn’t pick it up.

Jeeny: “You used to love silence,” she said. “Remember? You used to call it your church.”

Jack: “Yeah,” he said, finally turning off one of the monitors. “Now it just feels like a luxury I can’t afford.”

Jeeny: “That’s not true,” she said, walking closer. “You just traded silence for stimulation — and told yourself it was progress.”

Host: Her words hit with the precision of truth. The light from the monitor flickered against her face, cutting between shadow and luminescence, like a film reel skipping frames.

Jack: “It’s not about stimulation,” he said, rubbing his temples. “It’s survival. You disappear for five minutes now, and the world forgets you.”

Jeeny: “Then maybe it’s a world not worth remembering.”

Jack: “Easy for you to say. You still read by candlelight.”

Jeeny: “And you still call that primitive.”

Jack: “It is primitive.”

Jeeny: “It’s peaceful.”

Host: The screenlight reflected in her eyes, two tiny rectangles of digital ghostlight. She looked at him not with anger, but with quiet pity — the kind that comes from watching someone mistake noise for necessity.

Jeeny: “You know, Leo’s right,” she said. “It’s not the email or the tweet that ruins us — it’s what we let them replace. Every notification steals a heartbeat you could’ve spent being human.”

Jack: “You talk like technology’s the villain. It’s just a tool.”

Jeeny: “No. It’s a mirror. And what it shows us isn’t flattering.”

Jack: “You think I choose this?”

Jeeny: “You don’t have to choose it. It chooses you every time you don’t look away.”

Host: The silence between them grew — not from tension, but from the slow recognition of loss. Outside, the glow of digital billboards painted the skyline in artificial dawn.

Jeeny: “You used to tell me you worked hard so you could have more time for what mattered. But the more you worked, the less I saw you. You traded connection for connectivity.”

Jack: “I’m trying to build something.”

Jeeny: “And in the process, you’re dismantling everything real.”

Jack: “That’s dramatic.”

Jeeny: “No, Jack. That’s math. Fifteen minutes of lost focus. One text. One ping. Multiply that by a thousand days and you’ve built a life made of fragments.”

Host: He looked up then — really looked at her — and for the first time that night, his eyes seemed human again, stripped of blue glow, filled instead with regret.

Jack: “You make it sound like I can just walk away from it all.”

Jeeny: “Not walk away. Step back. Reclaim what’s left. You can’t outsource meaning, Jack. You can’t schedule love into your calendar and call it balance.”

Jack: “You think I don’t know that?”

Jeeny: “Then stop pretending you’re too busy to live.”

Host: The buzz came again — another alert, another slice of the digital world demanding attention. This time, he silenced it. The sound stopped. The silence returned — strange, heavy, beautiful.

Jeeny: “When was the last time you had a conversation that didn’t come with a blinking cursor?”

Jack: “Maybe this one,” he said quietly.

Jeeny: “Then let’s make it count.”

Host: She moved closer, her presence grounding the moment like gravity. The world outside their window blurred into colorless motion, but inside the small circle of light, time slowed — not as an idea, but as an act of defiance.

Jeeny: “Leo wasn’t warning us about technology,” she said. “She was warning us about attention — how easily we give it away, how rarely we give it to each other.”

Jack: “Attention is love, isn’t it?”

Jeeny: “The purest form of it.”

Jack: “Then maybe I’ve been loving the wrong things.”

Jeeny: “No,” she said softly. “You’ve just been loving too many things at once.”

Host: The clock on the wall ticked, quiet but insistent. For the first time in hours, neither of them moved to check a screen. The glow of the monitors had faded now; the only light came from the faint pulse of the city beyond the glass.

Jack: “You know what scares me most?”

Jeeny: “What?”

Jack: “That we’re teaching ourselves to mistake interruptions for meaning. That we’ll forget what stillness even feels like.”

Jeeny: “Then remember it now.”

Host: Her hand reached across the table, brushing his — a small, human gesture in a world drowning in abstraction. The moment felt fragile, unrepeatable — like a heartbeat reclaimed from machinery.

Jeeny: “You can rebuild focus,” she said gently. “But not friendship. Not love. Once they fade, they don’t reboot.”

Jack: “Then I guess I’m due for a hard reset.”

Jeeny: “Welcome back.”

Host: Outside, dawn began to rise — not digital light this time, but the honest kind, soft and unfiltered. It crept across their faces, dissolving the artificial glow that had ruled the night.

Host: And as the screens went dark, Jacqueline Leo’s words remained — etched not on glass, but in silence:

“One look at an email can rob you of 15 minutes of focus... one instant message can destroy your schedule, forcing you to move meetings, or blow off really important things, like love, and friendship.”

Host: Because in the end, the greatest luxury isn’t time —
it’s presence.
And every moment we look away from what matters
is a small betrayal of the life still waiting to be lived.