Dopamine, Smartphones and You: A battle for your time

Re:Dopamine, Smartphones and You: A battle for your time by marginalia_nu on Wednesday October 13, 2021 @08:28AM (#28851274)

I think reading books is a good way of practicing concentration. The moment you stop paying attention to the text, the reading falls apart completely. It gives a very direct feedback when your mind has wandered.

You can get away with skimming texts on the Internet, indeed you kind of have to with all the ads, inline links, and other visual cruft clamoring for your attention, but that usually does not work particularly well with books, especially if it's a more demanding read.

Reading can be shockingly hard if you haven't done it in a while, but it rapidly gets a lot easier.

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Re:Dopamine, Smartphones and You: A battle for your time by farias0 on Wednesday October 13, 2021 @10:49AM (#28852840)

I don't know, reading books to me is very easy, but I find hard to focus on work. I conditioned myself to instinctively alt-tab from my IDE every time a problem gets frustrating to the point I often do this without realizing, meanwhile my "reading workflow" haven't been poisoned yet. So my thesis is that this is less related to losing attention/willpower overall and it's more related to creating distracting habits.

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