Phone addiction is like food addiction. It is incredibly hard to moderate something that you have to consume every day. Both phones and food are also designed by industry to be as addictive as possible. I am struggling to read books because my attention span got so low.

I almost entirely read books from my phone now - the ability to search through notes and highlighted passages is just too good.

I’d argue that’s it’s not the phone per se, but the presented media that’s most damaging.

For me at least, dropping all social media was a game changer. No longer being force-fed content or having an app explicitly vying for my attention feels really refreshing - I choose where my attention goes.

I’ve noticed colleagues that receive Slack notifications for every. single. message.

I can’t comprehend how they’re able to continue to use a computer.

How are you reading books on your phone? I find the screen narrow and scrolling difficult.

I use the “Books” app that comes with iPhone. All books are downloaded in .ePub format (.mobi if on Kindle I believe).

epubs enable full text search, highlighting, bookmarking, ToC, automatic annotations, and dynamic scaling of page-numbers respective to font size.

As for turning pages, I really prefer the continuous scroll as opposed to the sideswipe. Maybe try that?

Reading a pdf can be a pain in the ass though, especially if it’s multi-columned. Although I gripe about that even with a monitor. My preference is to print in that case.

It’s not as comfortable as a tablet or e reader by far, but it’s good for random downtime that you can’t predict if you ask me.

*almost all social media. We're still here on HN, after all

My point is more that I decide when to participate - and that I’m not beckoned by a “red dot”, a “ding”, or another other sort of notification.

Fair, and I agree. I've actually added notifications for myself via http://hnreplies.com/, but the reason is to reduce my impulse to log in and scan my comments for replies; I filter notification emails into a dedicated folder that I can check when I want — no interruptions.

One interesting paper showed phones can affect you psychologically even if it was just lying there in the same room. You need to physically be in a different room or place for the mental state to change. I think the brain learns how it’s in reality always “active” even if locked.

Ive spent the last 2 years slowly learning how to read books again. It's hard when a decade of internetting fucked your attention span. Thankfully, it's a skill you can retrain! I started reading a few pages at a time and now I can focus for chapters at a time. It just takes practice.

Personal Anecdote: I bought a nice Eames replica lounge chair _specifically_ for reading in. I don’t use my phone or watch TV in it. I think having a separate space just for a single activity makes a lot of difference.

Do you have a link to that chair? Would you recommend it?

Certainly, I got this one. Modern materials but with the same mid century design. Totally worth it.

https://manhattanhomedesign.com/eames-lounge-chair-and-ottom...

And all the while machine learning engineers explicitly work to make them more addictive. At least tobacco companies didn't have a monopoly on information and they still held on to plausible deniability for as long as possible. This a serious problem that also affects our capacity to solve the problem.

What worked best for me was simply to put my phone on airplane mode, and only check it at specific intervals during the day.

Most people can wait for a response. It's quite absurd that we have collectively encouraged immediate response as 'normal', and rude if not done so.

It is pretty obvious that we become great at what we habitually practice every day. Therefor it's no coincidence that we will become great at being distracted because that's what we habitually practice.

Correlation is not necessarily causation.