Digitally saturated workplaces expose employees to overlapping messages, alerts, workflow updates, visibility cues, and requests that compete for limited attention. Prevailing responses often frame the resulting difficulty as an individual problem of focus, self-control, or communication etiquette, thereby underexamining how organizational systems allocate urgency, authorize interruption, and distribute the burden of resumption. This Original Governance Framework Article develops an evidence-bounded conceptual account of attention as an organizational resource and proposes an Attention-Governance Framework for analyzing priority conflict in digitally mediated work. The framework distinguishes digital interruption architectures from discrete interruption events and links channel design, response norms, priority authority, interruption legitimacy, resumption protection, escalation routes, recovery arrangements, and contestability. It further proposes behavioral narrowing as a conditional process through which overload may reduce cue sampling, compress decision horizons, defer voice, and constrain exploratory action. The article advances design principles and testable propositions while separating technological capability from legitimate authority, behavioral visibility from performance, formal policy from enacted practice, and conceptual plausibility from empirical validation. Its implications concern organizational design, employee well-being, coordination reliability, and research on dynamic attention processes. The framework remains non-empirical: its constructs, cross-level relationships, and governance mechanisms require construct validation, longitudinal and multilevel testing, and comparison with rival explanations such as workload, staffing, leadership climate, role conflict, and task interdependence. It is therefore offered as an original organizing synthesis rather than a validated causal model or implementation-ready prescription.
