My awakening moment about how smartphones fragment our attention span

I read through the entirety of the Percy Jackson books and the Heroes sequels, the Mortal Instruments, the Seven Realms Novels, and the complete unabridged HHGTG. All it took to get my book-a-day self back was bringing myself back to my teen years when I wasn't allowed on the computer with access to the internet and my texts cost .3 minutes to read or send and I only got 100/mo. I was averaging roughly 350 pages per day.

When I wasn't reading I was drawing or writing or outside being active when it was cool enough which improved my mental health even in spite of my heat based SAD.

At the end of the month I had the attention span when I got back online to attend to a cross country move and secure a job and an apartment by the end of August. I had been intending to move for the 3 years prior.

I wonder how I could go about taking advantage of the burst of creativity and focus while still being online enough to develop some of the software ideas I have that I never follow through on without getting overstimulated and distracted.

This describes every single person I know under the age of 25, and I'm in that demographic. It must be the single greatest public health experiment of all time.

The crazy part is, not one single person I know thinks of it as a bad thing. They just seem to accept it as part of life, which makes me feel so alienated whenever interacting with them, since I am hardly ever using my phone (the computer on the other hand...)

The problem is though, I'm addicted to my computer. I'm not actually sure it's that much better.

We discussed it a few times, and my belief is that small amount of friction, entering a particular room to go online, was enough to help him get more intentional about how he spends his days.

Needless to say, the man had a lot of interesting hobbies and was well read.

I had a similar journey. I’m even writing a book on it.

I have found that the one thing that has helped bring enlightenment to this problem is reading books and thinking each day on how to apply them or just simply observing those around me instead of being glued on a device.

I’m a bit further in that journey than the author and there are some great premises out there about the damage tech and our fragmented attention causes to our lives.

There are even great titles mentioned in this blog bringing awareness to them, but some of the more old and interesting perspectives are those of Thoreau(Walden) and Emerson(Self-Reliance).

While there’s a number of titles talking about internet or tech addiction, all we're doing is pointing out a problem rather than taking actual steps to improve our character to rid ourselves of these things to begin with. This problem is only going to get harder for the individual, and it’s up to each one of us to battle our own battles. No amount of reform will solve it for us.

Anything that would result in a requirement to swipe down from the top of the screen on android and look at a notification/popup and either slide it away to dismiss it or click on it.

It's easy to do in android or ios.

You should only see content when you specifically choose to open the app.

This is by no means a complete solution but goes a long way to reducing the compulsion to check things every 5 minutes.

If (like me) you say "damn that's a lot of things I have to a significant degree" then you should

a. read up on executive (dys)function, and

b. Ask your GP/doctor if you may have ADHD*

* - often CPTSD, physical brain trauma etc can also cause similar symptoms, as they can also cause physical changes in the brain similar to ADHD (There's a lot more of nuance and stuff that can be discussed, I'll try my best if anyone has any questions)

As a member of a generation that can still focus, i.e., one not born into a world of personal computers, let alone pocket-sized ones, nor "tech" hype, I hope the author and his peers^1 figure out that this "economy" needs to be "disrupted" sooner rather than later, no matter how profitable it may be for a chosen few.

1. And the other people doing most of the work to "build" these distractions and the people being targeted with them.

It saddens me that many members of older generations, who did learn how to focus, have decided to go along for the ride with the younger ones into this attention span abyss. IMHO there are substantial "life skills" that are being lost due to "tech" hype and money-making. We cannot expect younger folks to understand what they are, as the mindless "tech" hype ceaselessly commands their attention above all else. Money-making no matter what the cost to society. These disappearing life skills have value, e.g., ability to concentrate, ability to evaluate facts and think critically (cf. simply voicing uneducated opinions and complaining about anything and everything to the internet), ability to deal with conflict, and so on. The OP managed to remember the value of concentration, so perhaps anyone can do it. Please do not give up. That is exactly what the "tech" companies want you to do.

Eventually you look back and see thousands of hours you could have spent building something or learning an instrument or whatnot.

Instead you just kinda pissed it away on gossip and getting anxious about events you have no control of.

My most productive time on this phone is when I’m learning new stuff here on HN. But even that can probably be curbed a lot.

I’m thinking about how I break this cycle. One main issue is that I want to create using a laptop. But I have young kids who rightfully demand my attention often. That’s why social media fills the thousand little gaps so well.

I’m thinking I need to learn how to write code in short segments of as little as 15 minutes. At work I need to build up context and state in my mind. But I can’t do that in such short bursts. So I need to learn how to do “stateless programming” per se.

This leads me to wondering: if I had the memory of a goldfish, how would I go about writing an application? Some way to spend 15 minutes breaking a big problem into self contained 15 minute tasks. I’m convinced the software architecture will reflect this and as a result I’ll discover different paradigms for how to write software.

It's really no wonder that your brain rejects all that when it tasted variety of information delivered at much higher speeds.

I don't think I wouldn't be able to focus on textbook for mathematical analysis that's so dense that reading two pages takes an hour ... but books filled with so so many words that were just excercise in language use for the author and carry barely any information? Mostly, no thank you. It's not a problem of focus. It's a problem of rising standards on what feels interesting.

Even the author of this essey admits he had no trouble reading a book when he finally found one that was actually interesting for him (because he felt it was about him and his self-percieved plight).

There’s no such thing as an ‘average’ attention span, and even for those individual tasks it would be very much context dependent (where I’m sitting, what I’m doing at the time, my general opinion of the author, the mood I’m in).

It’s a nice story, and it will invariably generate a nice stream of anecdata in a comments section like this, but there’s very little evidence for it at all.

I just stuck to my Nokia 'dumbphone' while it still worked and after the last of the networks that it used went dark I switched to the N800, it's not perfect (technically a smartphone, it runs KaiOS), but it still has buttons and I refuse to go online with it (you can't do much on that silly screen anyway). In a pinch it will serve as a mobile hotspot.

so I can perform context switch easier

95% of the work was coding and it actually helped me to sit for 1-3 hours per two weeks and do solid step ahead

Unfortunely now I do not have such privilege to have separate room to learn :(

I believe environment may make things way easier.

Also I feel like I'm music addicted, very often the very first thing that I do on my PC is start playing some music. I do wonder how it affects e.g learning, focusing and similar.

I did notice that in competitive video games I play worse when listening do music, and when it's "spiky music" e.g some Disturbed's song, then I play riskier.

___________

I do wonder whether there is some "distraction meter" for workplace - e.g 3 meetings a day (all of them with 2h gaps) + scrum + 5 emails that require at least 5 minutes of attention = not much can be done

That problem is that people, as a rule, live in a dream-world. The smartphone just provides the most convenient exterior manifester of dreams that we've invented so far.

The cellphone is a dream-amplifier. The natural evolution from books, radio and tv.

But the central problem isn't the phone. It's our habitual-dwelling-in and preference-for the dreamworld. The phone is just the enabler.

The most terrible thing for me is 2FA, especially at work. If I'm focused on something and I have to open the notifications on my phone in order to complete the demanding task, I'm at high risk of an attention lapse. I wish there was a 2FA app that functioned entirely within the lock screen or even the Always-On Display.

There is very often (even some in the article) visual noise in or around the text. Ads are designed to draw attention to themselves, and ignoring them wears on your cognitive resources.

Sometimes the text is "enhanced" to fight back against the surrounding noise by adding images or color or highlighting portions of the text or any number of tricks. That just makes the visual noise worse, and further adds to the habit of skimming.

It's like talking in a bar. The noisier it gets, the more the communication turns into shouting short simple sentences, further adding to the noise level, further imposing restrictions on what's able to be communicated.

Also, I don't have any chat apps in my phone except whatsapp. Definitely no facebook app and even instagram, though present, is completely silenced. I also silence all notifications in general except phone calls.

All together, these things have helped keep the phone handy without it turning my brain to mush.

Every time I take a vacation, I spend much less time plugged into the world. Each time, I come back refreshed and more in touch with myself.

The phone and our collective reliance on them is not healthy. It will take some collective effort for me, and some of my friends, to try to plan events more regularly, in order that I am not feeling the need to have my phone with me so much.

I'm also going to make a few more MP3 discs for my car, which thankfully has a CD player (2014 model).

I can't emphasize enough how important it was for me to read this article. At least I know I'm not alone.

I want to read some book and play some computer games. Neither is working for me because of some "problems"(?). In case of books I was aware that the phone is the problem. But in case of games I was pretty sure that I'm just "too old". But more and more I think about it, the phone is again the cause of this.

You can control what takes your attention, but at the same time everything is _designed_ to take your attention. Ad blockers are an example of this sort of exercise - you can limit what tries to take your attention, but it requires action.

It's kind of astonishing that "read a book" somehow got turned into "have a book read to you" and that the author still doesn't manage to get it done.

Reading is fundamentally different to listening. One is active, the other passive.

Then the ending's conclusion is completely nonsensical:

>Some other challenges I’m still figuring out, like how to navigate a city without Google Maps. I bought a handful of paper maps and found myself looking at the area, trying to grok the logic of the streets and analyzing the area’s layout seemingly for the first time.

What do the skills of hunter gatherers have to do with clearer thinking?

Would life be better if instead of writing on a keyboard you only wrote on parchment made from the skins of animals you hunted? I imagine the authors writing would improve, only because there would be a lot less of it.

This won't work for everyone, but maybe 6 months ago I got a phone safe (this kind of thing: <https://shorturl.at/drzMT>, I refer to it as the "phone jail"), which I leave my phone in from bedtime every night to ~4pm the next day. And I leave the whole rig on my bedroom shelf while I go to work at the library/cafe/kitchen table.

There are obvious drawbacks to this that I don't think most people would accept (especially regarding being reachable or having a way to place emergency calls). But it's been invaluable for me to make the mental space I need to finish my manuscript. Plus you can still use the phone through the holes in the cover if you need to, it's just really annoying and not very portable.

In the long run, I'd like to become a fliphone guy like some other commenters here, but I genuinely do get a lot of value from having a smartphone. I just need to get away from it during working hours.

I can't recommend the feature phone experience warmly enough. About the only thing I really miss is a decent camera in my phone. Lugging a camera along is a bit of a nuisance.

All of this doesn't completely free me from the attention economy though.

Firstly, I distract myself. I still read the news more than is good for me. From time to time, I'll even play silly computer games excessively. FOSS games, but still quite distracting.

Secondly, as the article describes, there's the profound cultural shift I have to cope with. Many people, even friends, don't even think about asking me for permission to let Siri, Alexa or Google overhear our conversations. Just because they want to be plugged in.

When we are discussing what year Greg Lemond beat Laurent Fignon in the Tour de France, is the goal knowing some useless trivia? No, it's the conversation. The social process is the goal.

Well done!

You still have a lot ahead of you.

Next step: Avoid any and all background noise. Chatter and music. Chatter is worse than music, but music is still bad. In contrast, sounds of nature are absolutely fine. If you don't like those, then there's something wrong with you.

Assuming you're used to background noise you will hate this, though, but if you can muster up the discipline and get over yourself, you won't regret the increase in your cognitive abilities, once they push into your awareness.

Most people have no idea of what's there to explore.

You're welcome. :)

He's been so busy noticing everything else that he didn't bother to pay attention to the hugely disruptive distraction everyone's been talking about for over a decade now.

And then he blames his inability to focus on some externality instead of realizing it's his condition.

I recently deleted 100% of my Reddit and Quora posts (10-15 years worth) - didn't even bother to save anything. Just better to pull the bandaid off fast. Such an improvement.

If I get bored and feel the urge to go online, I take a walk outside.

I'm seriously thinking about getting a dumb phone and tossing my iPhone entirely. I don't actually use it for more than literal phone and text. I disconnected e-mail on it a year ago. Of course, never had social media.

Note: I've been on the internet since it was called Arpanet and I was heavily involved in the 1G web. No stranger to being online but my views have its utility and value have changed - I now believe it's nearly the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity.

My vice instead is spending too much time reading or tinkering on my laptop in my spare time, even sometimes when I should be doing other things (probably like now :) )

I like the smartphone for things that are useful - primarily maps, a chat application with my wife, translating words between my first and second language that will absolutely plague me if I don't know the answer to and looking up some things on the go. That's good enough for me with that.

I find that I can pay attention to the things I'm interested in as well as I ever could, but interests change and develop over time. I still avoid smartphones, but I don't think they've actually done anything to my attention span

To be honest, since introduction of Do not disturb by Apple iPhone, I am very unbothered during working hours.

This is a great article.

I learned to disable all but important notifications. But I still suffer many symptoms the author has described.

IMO, an overwhelming amount of the content on the internet adds nothing on top of its title. You eventually learn to consume all the content without putting too much effort, by skimming quickly, otherwise it's exhausting.

I don't know what could be a solution here. Some sort of filtering for the content is needed, but how to implement it exactly?

Perhaps one should put more focus on reading books instead of free articles on the internet. But this does not solve the problem completely. Many books suffer from the same lack of sense.

Does anyone have any ideas or any related experience regarding the content moderation for consumption?

All those 5-10 second breaks -- waiting for a light, waiting for an elevator... If it were not for the phone, what would you typically do? Focus on some random thought or two. Then snap out of it and carry on. The fact that now this is often not a random thought but random input from random app doesn't seem to change that much - pattern stayed the same, just now you can see it in other people from the outside, so it seems more profound.

I have the same issue at home with a laptop. compulsive F5, serial alt-tabber ... nature wasn't ready for this amount of thin stimuli and shallow emotional hooks.

I'm not checking my phone one quarter of what I was before.

Notifications throughout the day except for the very important things/people I deem are grouped for later viewing if I want to--I find at the end of the day I almost always dismiss most of them.

0 - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.synapse.al...

There are so many interesting blog posts and long-form content out there. Over the year, I trained my mind to not consuming them on my phone/computer. Instead, I send those articles to my Kindle. At some point, I decided to build a tool to support more than just web articles[0]. Give it a try if you're looking for a better way to consume online content.

[0]: https://ktool.io

[1]: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL21618775W/How_to_Break_up_wi...

I've read a lot ever since I was a kid, and a couple of years ago when I felt I wasn't reading books as much as I used to I decided to turn the habit around, with what I consider minimal change in what I followed, instead changing how I followed. More than anything it's a matter of ruthless curation. I think it helps that I have a Kindle and the Kindle apps on my tablet and phone. I'm literally never without a book.

Does it fragment your attention if to the outsider you're able to focus on this device for several hours without a break?

Or does it not work like that?

My work makes me eager to throw my phone/laptop away as soon as possible; I'm definitely a workaholic and rather dangerously at that, so maybe I'm getting the same result via a different means; but there is almost always a point at the day when I just need to zone out on a dumb show I've watched a ton of times or just take a run with a bit of music or a nice walk and zone out on some music or even just the sounds of the city for awhile.

My work more or less has roped me into social media to some degree for some part of the day, and I really don't like social media at all; I don't dismiss it, it's just not the way I like communicating and because I deal with a lot of awful customers via social media (often fruitlessly) I have a very dour understanding of it as the same communication mechanisms that the awful customers implement are what I see elsewhere. When I do see non-negative/complaining content on social media, it's just not that interesting, and I'm more relieved that it's not some non-sense I have to deal with than I am interested in what someone has to say.

For me, modern social media even makes it easy for me not to get into it. Instagram floods sponsored objects when I just want to go and like my friend's pictures/stories. Reddit kills itself for me with its comment/voting system and the efforts to make it readable in a way I like just isn't worth it for the content I find. Twitter is the best at keeping me out of social media as it actively does its best to ensure I can't read Twitter content without signing up and giving a bunch of information I don't want to give, so I don't even have a chance to get hooked on something before the login modal hides the content. The less said about Youtube and its social media aspect, the better but it's absolutely unintelligible; even trying to follow older conversations (less than a month) is impossible sometimes as there are so many orphaned responses that you can't follow the context of a given answer as it was deleted or hidden somewhere else or someone changed their username(? I'm not sure if this is a thing but it's one of the only other ways I can understand what I see).

I can at least respect TikTok in that you can access everything without an account or even an app, and more or less it's the same experience, but there is so much repeat content that it's just not interesting.

When I want to check something nowadays, I just check it. If I want to go for a walk and just think for awhile, the most distracting thing is just that I'm processing too many projects/problems from the week, and I need to physically move a bit to calm down a bit. Cooking, running, reading articles, taking a crack at some code project, it's calming because it's easy to focus on, and the only challenge I have is just exhaustion most of the time.