The phrase "barely a thought" is a correct and usable part of a sentence in written English.
You may use it when you want to convey that something is lacking or virtually non-existent. For example, "He gave the matter barely a thought before he acted."
There's barely a thought given to Scottish audiences.
Those who could only tie a shoelace before now lash down sails with barely a thought.
We turn on our taps, flush our lavatories and water our plants with barely a thought.
Before the internet, we navigated multiple, shifting levels of privacy with barely a thought.
San Franciscans scoop it up with barely a thought, as if excellent fresh food were simply a California birthright.
Our post-18 education system appears designed with the interests of young people from affluent backgrounds in mind, with barely a thought for the rest.
Some of us could barely complete a thought without touch pads or scroll buttons, but we understood that high-speed data systems did not belong here.
We were so struck by the display and its sheer audacity that we barely gave a thought to the loss of our fish.
And of course, it must be worse for so-called "digital natives", the generation brought up with smartphones, who can barely have a thought without sharing it with the world.
After all, for much of the last 50 years our national conversation about educational inequality has focused almost exclusively on strategies for reducing inequalities between the educational successes of the poor and the middle class, and it has relied on programs aimed at the poor, like Head Start and Title I. We've barely given a thought to what the rich were doing.
As we head into the hottest part of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, in what could be the hottest year on record, we barely give a thought to what using air conditioning does to our electricity grid.
