My awakening moment about how smartphones fragment our attention span

I had a similar awakening moment about 5 years ago. Felt like I wasted my 20s on consuming content and only playing video games outside of work.

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.

I did a digital detox in July of 2020, I had become overwhelmed with Discord and Reddit moderation and trying to Keep Up. I burned out hard. I turned off all electronics for a month and uninstalled the apps and restricted my phone use to calls and responding to 3 close friend's texts at a set time each day--I didn't keep it on me at all. No video games, no TV, no watch or music streaming. I had my library of local music loaded to my trusty Zune and used that exclusively for music as the only device I carried with me.

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.

Worth noting that Tom has since returned to smartphone usage (with some interesting tweaks): https://idratherbewriting.com/blog/returning-to-smartphones/

I do wonder how much web design contributes to the apparent epidemic of attention difficulties.

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.

There are some valid insights in this piece, but just a note of caution about the book by Johann Hari that he cites a lot. This Twitter thread unpicks a lot of issues with that book: https://twitter.com/DrMatthewSweet/status/147912591089697587...