Our attention is the most valuable thing we have

The hours

I didn’t feel like I was on my phone for 5 hours. It never felt like a long time. It felt like a minute here and a minute there. Waiting for coffee. In the elevator. In bed before sleep. In bed after waking up.

That is how it works for most of us. In one study, researchers logged the phones of young adults for two weeks. They used their phones about 85 times a day, and more than half of those uses were shorter than 30 seconds.¹ The same people could not guess how often they picked up their phone. Their guesses were not even close.

Short checks add up to long days. The average internet user spends 3 hours and 46 minutes a day online on a phone.² That is about 57 full days a year. In the UK, adults aged 18 to 24 spend more than 6 hours a day online, not counting work, and more than 5 of those hours are on a smartphone.³ And 4 in 10 American adults now say they are online “almost constantly.” Ten years ago it was 2 in 10.⁴

My own math: I went from about 5 hours to 1 hour 45 minutes. That is about 3 hours 15 minutes back every day. Over a year it is about 1,186 hours, or 74 waking days.

Seventy-four days. Every year

What a minute here and there costs

The hours are the part we can see. The part we can’t see is what the checks do to the rest of the day.

Gloria Mark has measured how people use their screens at work since 2004. In 2004, people stayed on one screen for about two and a half minutes before they switched to something else. In 2012 it was 75 seconds. Now it is about 47 seconds.⁵

Every switch has a cost. When we switch from one task to another, we are slower and we make more mistakes for a moment.⁶ Each switch costs only a little, but we switch many times an hour. And part of our mind stays on the last thing we looked at, which makes the next thing harder.⁷

Even the phone we don’t touch has a cost. In one experiment, people got a call or a text alert while they worked on a hard task. They didn’t answer it. Their work still got worse, almost as much as if they had picked up the phone.⁸ In another study, 221 people kept their alerts on for one week and off for another week. In the week with alerts on, they felt more distracted and more restless.⁹

I noticed this before I read any of it. I would open my laptop to write something hard, check my phone “for a second”, and 20 minutes later I was reading about someone else’s life. The hard thing waited. Often until the next day

It’s not our fault, but it is our problem

The apps on our phones are built by some of the best engineers in the world, and their job is to keep us there. The more time we spend, the more ads they sell.

There is a lot of scary science on the internet about this. Much of it isn’t true. Our attention span is not shorter than a goldfish’s. That number came from a marketing report, and nobody could find any research behind it.¹⁰ Phones don’t “flood our brain with dopamine like a drug”, and there is no such thing as a dopamine detox.¹¹ Heavy phone use is not an official diagnosis.¹²

What is true is simpler. Our brain learns from rewards that come at random times: a like, a message, a funny video. We don’t get one every time we check. So we learn to check again.¹³ Researchers who studied more than a million social media posts found that people post in the same pattern as animals that learn to find food: they come back when the rewards come back.¹⁴

So it’s not weak character. It is a normal brain doing what brains do, in front of a product made to use that.

But it is still our problem. Nobody else is going to give us our hours back

Willpower was the wrong tool

For years I tried to fix this with willpower. Screen Time limits. Focus apps. I even tried a flip phone. Every one of them had an off switch, and on a tired evening I always found it. “Ignore limit for today.” Every day.

It turns out people with strong self-control don’t win this fight more often. They have the fight less often. In a study that followed 205 adults through more than 7,800 moments of temptation, the people with the best self-control resisted temptation less often than others, because they had fewer temptations around them.¹⁵ They set up their life so the fight doesn’t start. Researchers call this a situational strategy, like a student who goes to the library and leaves the phone at home.¹⁶

The biggest study I found on this says the same thing. About 2,000 adults got a tool that let them set hard daily limits on their apps. Most of them chose to use it, and 78% kept the limits on until the end of the study, without any reward for it. Their time on the most tempting apps went down by 22 minutes a day. The researchers estimate that about one third of our social media use comes from self-control problems: use we would stop if we could.¹⁷

That is the part that changed my thinking. I didn’t need more discipline. I needed to stop asking myself the same question 85 times a day

What I did

This summer I read a post by Stepan Parunashvili about turning an iPhone into a “dumbphone” with Apple’s own tools for companies. A company phone can be set up so that some apps and websites are gone, and the person holding it can’t change that. I did it to my own phone.

The first version was too strict. The App Store was off, my bank app broke and I couldn’t scan the menu at a restaurant. So I changed it. I kept everything useful and removed only the feeds: the apps and websites made for endless scrolling.

My phone still does everything I need. Calls, messages, maps, photos, music, my bank, my calendar, Claude. It just doesn’t have anything to scroll.

The first two weeks felt strange. I picked up the phone, unlocked it, and there was nothing to open. I put it back. After a few weeks I stopped picking it up.

I read books again. I build things in the hours I used to scroll. More than an hour of my 1 hour 45 minutes is me giving work to my coding agents from my phone.

I’m not against social media. X and LinkedIn gave me real opportunities, and I still post there, from my computer, on purpose. The feed is the problem, not the people

What changes when the feeds are gone

I can tell you how it felt for me. But my story is one story, so here is what happens when researchers test it with many people.

In 2025, researchers blocked mobile internet on the phones of 467 adults for two weeks. Calls and texts still worked. Their phone time went from 5 hours 14 minutes a day to 2 hours 41 minutes. Their attention got better on a lab test, and their mood and well-being got better too. 91% of them improved on at least one of these. They spent more time with people in person, more time outside, and more time exercising.¹⁸

Almost the same numbers as mine. I didn’t know that study existed when I started.

In another experiment, people who quit Facebook for four weeks got back about an hour a day. They spent it offline, with friends and family, and they felt a little happier.¹⁹ Students who limited social media to about 30 minutes a day for three weeks felt less lonely and less depressed.²⁰

Sleep gets better too. Children who use a phone or tablet at bedtime are about twice as likely to not get enough sleep.²¹ And it isn’t the blue light. In a test with 167 young adults, Night Shift did nothing for sleep. Putting the phone away did.²²

I want to be fair here: the research is not all clear. Scientists still disagree about how much phones hurt mental health, and the average effect in big studies is small.²³ But the experiments where people actually use their phones less point in one direction. People get time back, and most of them are glad they did

Why attention matters

Here is what I believe after all of this.

Our attention is the most valuable thing we have. Everything good in my life came from paying attention to something for a long time: learning to design, learning to build, my work, my health, my friends. None of it came from a feed.

When we give our attention away in 30-second pieces, we don’t only lose hours. We stop doing hard things. Hard things need long, quiet blocks of time, and the phone breaks those blocks into small pieces before we notice.

We don’t need to throw our phones away. We need phones that work for us: phones for calls, photos, maps, music, work and learning. Not phones that work for someone else’s ad sales.

The good news is that this is one of the few big changes in life that takes an afternoon, not years

Sources

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