When I stand for salah my mind runs everywhere, to my work, my phone, my worries. Does a prayer even count if my heart was never really in it?
Before anything else, notice the worry itself. A heart with no love for the prayer does not grieve over its wandering. Start from there, not from despair.
Allah has named what He wants for us in the prayer, and He named it as something to grow toward:
“Successful indeed are the believers, those who are humbly submissive in their prayer.”
Qur’an, Al-Mu’minun 23:1-2 · meaning
Khushu is the heart’s humility, the quiet presence you are asking about. Notice where it is placed: as a description of those who succeed, a destination, not a gate shut in the face of everyone who has not arrived yet. The invitation is to walk toward it.
As for the mind running off to your work, your phone, your hundred small worries, this is old ground. The Prophet, peace be upon him, spoke about it plainly. There is a warning in his words, and a promise folded inside the warning:
“A man finishes his prayer and there is written for him only a tenth of it, or a ninth, an eighth, a seventh, a sixth, a fifth, a fourth, a third, or a half.”
The Prophet (peace be upon him), Sunan Abi Dawud (796) · meaning
Read it carefully. The portion your heart was present for is written down and kept. That is not a small thing, and that portion can grow, prayer by prayer. The words were said to draw us toward presence, not to push us into despair.
And the people of knowledge have long held something gentler with you than you are with yourself: a thought that comes uninvited during the prayer, one you do not welcome and settle into, is not counted against you. The wandering in itself is not your sin. You are only being asked to keep coming back, quietly, without making a scene of it.
The warning in Surah Al-Ma’un is about something else entirely:
“So woe to those who pray yet are heedless of their prayer.”
Qur’an, Al-Ma’un 107:4-5 · meaning
The wording is “heedless of their prayer”, not “heedless in their prayer”. The one warned is the one who lets the prayer slip out of his life, not the one who stands in it and struggles to stay. You are standing. That is a different matter altogether.
What our own age has learned fits with this. Those who study attention find that the mind wanders for close to half our waking hours, and that presence is not a switch to be flicked on but a skill that ripens through soft, repeated return. So each time you notice the drift and come back, that is not a fall. That is the training itself.
One small step: In your next prayer, take the Fatiha alone as your ground. Each time the mind slips, bring it back there without reproaching yourself, the way you would take a small child by the hand and walk him back.