I only skimmed, so maybe you discuss this and I missed it, my apologies if so—what about a metric that logs screen time over the course of a day, and tracks frequency of major task shift? E.g. we could classify websites as “work-related” or “entertainment” or “other” and then track how many shifts from work-related to entertainment happen throughout the day. If we had been tracking this for 20 years then maybe we’d have some good data on pretty much exactly the problem I’m most concerned about when I say attention spans seem to be declining...
Mark 2023 looks at this, I’ve summarized the relevant stuff at the end of this section, and the time spent per task has indeed been declining. I don’t know about research looking at task classification, but that would be interesting to do.
My current take is that this provides medium evidence—but I think this could also be evidence of higher ability at priorization.
Better at getting specific information out of a present piece of information (e.g. becoming skilled at skimming), better at putting tasks aside when they need some time to be processed in the background.
I would buy that hypothesis if the data was less time between switches within work-related tasks, but if the pattern is more frequent visits to entertainment sites during work hours, that sure doesn’t sound like a good thing to me. Yeah maybe it’s wisely letting stuff process in the background while I browse reddit or less wrong, but very likely it just is what it appears to be- degraded attention span and/or I creased internet addiction.
Thank you for this! Strong-upvoted.
I only skimmed, so maybe you discuss this and I missed it, my apologies if so—what about a metric that logs screen time over the course of a day, and tracks frequency of major task shift? E.g. we could classify websites as “work-related” or “entertainment” or “other” and then track how many shifts from work-related to entertainment happen throughout the day. If we had been tracking this for 20 years then maybe we’d have some good data on pretty much exactly the problem I’m most concerned about when I say attention spans seem to be declining...
Mark 2023 looks at this, I’ve summarized the relevant stuff at the end of this section, and the time spent per task has indeed been declining. I don’t know about research looking at task classification, but that would be interesting to do.
My current take is that this provides medium evidence—but I think this could also be evidence of higher ability at priorization.
Higher ability at prioritization? What do you mean?
Better at getting specific information out of a present piece of information (e.g. becoming skilled at skimming), better at putting tasks aside when they need some time to be processed in the background.
I would buy that hypothesis if the data was less time between switches within work-related tasks, but if the pattern is more frequent visits to entertainment sites during work hours, that sure doesn’t sound like a good thing to me. Yeah maybe it’s wisely letting stuff process in the background while I browse reddit or less wrong, but very likely it just is what it appears to be- degraded attention span and/or I creased internet addiction.