Bilingual

They Stole Your Attention
13 hours ago
- The average human attention span on a screen has dropped from ~150 seconds in 2004 to 47 seconds by 2016, and remained at 47 seconds as of 2025.
- After a screen switch or interruption, it takes an average of 25 minutes and 26 seconds to fully re-immerse in the original task.
- Microsoft 365 telemetry from 2025 shows that the most interrupted workers face an interruption every 2 minutes during core hours, totaling 275 interruptions per day.
- Meta's ad revenue per user in the US and Canada reached $57.03 worldwide in 2025, an all-time high, highlighting the monetization of attention.
- The article recommends keeping your phone in another room, removing feeds from work machines, and maintaining blocks of hours that no notifications can interrupt.
Might doomscrolling cause our commitment muscles to atrophy?
14 days ago
- Critics once worried about television's impact on attention spans, but even it required weekly viewing commitments unlike today's fleeting TikTok scrolling.
- Reading books for pleasure is declining, with even a typical romance novel representing a commitment equivalent to thousands of tweets, highlighting a shift away from sustained engagement.
- Marshall McLuhan's idea that 'the medium is the message' suggests a difference between spending time on long-form content (like movies) versus endless scrolling, which affects our practice of commitment.
- While faster media consumption offers benefits like consumer choice and agency, doomscrolling undermines attention spans and reduces opportunities to exercise commitment.
- Commitment is essential for achieving hard, positive outcomes such as starting a company, getting married, or raising a family, requiring deliberate choices and persistence through difficulty.
- Without regular practice, we may lose the ability to commit, so it's important to deliberately exercise commitment muscles, like finishing a recommended movie or book instead of quickly abandoning them.
- In a world encouraging passive consumption, making conscious choices to engage with longer content can help counteract the decline in commitment, even if it starts with small acts.
Blocking internet on phones improves attention, mental health, and well-being
15 days ago
- A month-long randomized controlled trial found that blocking mobile internet access on smartphones for two weeks improved mental health, subjective well-being, and objectively measured sustained attention.
- 91% of participants showed improvement in at least one of these psychological outcomes, indicating broad positive effects from the intervention.
- Mediation analyses suggest that the improvements were partially due to changes in time use: participants spent more time socializing in person, exercising, and being in nature when mobile internet was blocked.
- The study provides causal evidence that constant connection to the internet via smartphones may harm time use, cognitive functioning, and well-being.

attention span

They Stole Your Attention

Might doomscrolling cause our commitment muscles to atrophy?

Blocking internet on phones improves attention, mental health, and well-being