Over a single hour on a screen, our attention will shift a mind-boggling 77 times, flitting from one open tab to another. And in the course of a day, we’ll peer in on our inboxes at least 74 times, not unlike a lab rat pushing a lever for its treat.
They’re sobering discoveries about our degrading attention spans from Gloria Mark, a researcher and author who studies technology, focus and stress. In 2016, Dr. Mark and her colleagues found that workers were no longer able to concentrate on a single task on their screens for more than 47 seconds, down from 2.5 minutes in 2004.
Today, she worries about how often we reach for our phones out of boredom, even as scrolling is deeply mind-numbing itself. “The technologies meant to fill our time seem to be taking away meaning,” she wrote this month in her newsletter The Future of Attention.
In this country, nearly half of 15-to-24-year-olds and a third of 25-to-34-year-olds admit they use their phones every 15 minutes, Statistic Canada’s 2022 Canadian Internet Use Survey found. Within these age groups, nearly a third had modified their phone or app settings to try and control the time they hand over to their devices.
As tech keeps fracturing our attention, siphoning off our time and diluting meaningful experiences, therapists, authors and artists are experimenting with new approaches to rein in focus and help people return to the things that matter.
I quit my smartphone for two weeks to see if I’d have a better life
Among their more counter-intuitive findings: Not all screentime is bad for us. Digital detoxes have their pitfalls, leaving us scrolling with a vengeance once we’re back online. And though we blame other people for bombarding our phones, much of our distraction is self-made. The Globe spoke with three thinkers about how they combat digital overwhelm.
Re-building focus
Now that our phones are so intertwined with our lives, it’s unrealistic to think we can rein in screentime through willpower alone, Mark Tigchelaar and Oscar de Bos argue in Focus On-Off: Fuel Your Attention, Get More Done, published in December.
“Blaming technology gets away from the real discussion that has to be done. Every time there’s a new technology, life goes faster, and we have to figure out a way to handle that,” Mr. de Bos said from Amsterdam.
“We have to have a better connection with the phone. We’re too far in society to say we should get rid of it.”
The Dutch co-authors rattle off dozens of strategies to reclaim focus and ring boundaries around time, in the face of tech designed to pull us away.
It starts with limiting pesky notifications from your various social media feeds. Then, redesigning your inbox, Slack channels and other communication platforms so that the most urgent work memos get funneled into one stream.
The authors say it’s important to set rhythms for dealing with the rest of the information that comes your way; most of it isn’t urgent. So, instead of checking e-mail 74 times – the daily average at work, according to Dr. Gloria Mark – schedule in fewer, more focused scans of the inbox. And when you’re concentrating, set an out-of-office reply that states just that: You might be in office but you’re head down.
They also address open office spaces, a maze of distractions. Mr. de Bos founded Focus Academy, a training agency that hosts sessions with corporate organizations including PricewaterhouseCoopers, L’Oreal and various banks and law firms.
One of his trainees was inspired to experiment with a do-not-disturb light, an illuminated flag that office workers clip to the side of their computer screens. Red light means you’re concentrating; green light signals, “Go ahead, talk to me.” The trainee said the experiment ended with most of his co-workers leaving their red lights up all day long, revealing just how desperate people are to focus.
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For any attention hack to take hold at the office, employees need buy-in from their colleagues – a shift in workplace culture that acknowledges everyone needs uninterrupted time to get important things done, Mr. de Bos said.
In his own life, the author puts his phone out of sight in a drawer during work hours. He uses a Dutch design called a Fairphone, which has a switch on the side that launches a simplified home screen to reduce distraction.
With regular smartphones, he recommends nesting time-wasting apps inside folders off the main homepage. He suggests moving these apps around periodically, so it’s not as easy to open them without some effort or thought.
The authors are less convinced about digital detoxing, pointing to a 2023 German study that found people responded better with one less hour online a day than a forced, seven-day detox. Resisting the urge to reach for a phone eats up energy, and many go right back to their scrolling habits after a detox ends. “You cannot wait to come back to use it again, and you come back harder,” Mr. de Bos said. “That doesn’t solve a lot.”
In the fight to reclaim our attention from tech, the stakes are high. The author described working with employees who’d regained more concentration at the office and found a new surge of energy coming home to family and friends.
When people are given the space to focus, they’re happier, more innovative at work and more social beyond it: “Minimizing interruptions lets you dive deeper, work more comfortably, finish your tasks faster, and go home satisfied more often,” the authors write.
Creatively screen-free
Ever tried grey-scaling your phone, draining the screen of its colour? Did it make Instagram and Pinterest less visually appealing, less tempting?
What about enlisting your kid as a personal “phone warden” – handing your (locked) device to a child who hides it for an hour so you can keep on track at the home office?
The whimsical interventions come from RECESS 2026 Creative Playbook, a 222-page guide featuring creative people working in 20 countries, sharing their secrets for protecting focus from online overwhelm.
RECESS is the brainchild of Toronto experiential creative director Jody Orsborn Medina. As she watched the astronomical rise of AI in her industry, she noticed clients expecting projects to be turned around faster. Paradoxically, that’s translated into ever longer hours in front of screens for creatives.
“There’s a lot of overwhelm. You literally are tethered to your computer,” Ms. Orsborn Medina said. “There is real pushback from the creatives that we still need space, time and a pause for that spark – for creativity to happen. Screen-free interventions are important for both a mental health reset and a creative reset.”
The Playbook is brimming with tools, ideas and platforms meant to help people unplug, concentrate and create.
To start, app-based interventions such as Opal and Freedom temporarily block other, more distracting apps on phones; many creatives actively use these tools.
Then there are the physical locking systems. Bloom Card is a stainless steel keycard that blocks whichever apps or social media platforms sidetrack you use the most. Everything remains blocked until the card is tapped on the phone again. The idea is to store the card elsewhere during periods of deep focus, creating a physical hurdle on the path to mindless scrolling.
Other platforms work to visually narrow the focus. Ms. Orsborn Medina is a fan of Aperture, an experimental tool from UK design studio Special Projects. Aperture asks users to flip the smartphone backward inside its protective case, leaving just a small portion of the screen visible through the case’s camera window. A simplified interface is visible through the small window, allowing just a few basic functions – taking photos, listening to music, receiving texts and so on. Users can also customize their experience, permitting calls from certain people, or choosing what they can see before bedtime.
The Playbook points to a resurgence of slower, tactile, analog pursuits, including a push for activities that require two hands, both off the phone. Think quilting, embroidery, or pushing a stroller. Ms. Orsborn Medina recently took up ceramics: “I physically cannot use my phone when my hands are busy on the wheel. If want to use my phone, it’ll be all covered in clay.”
The Playbook ends with a series of challenges, including a “No Search Day,” which asks people to abstain from search engines and AI queries for 24 hours, sourcing all their answers from books, people or their own powers of observation. “Notice what you miss and what surfaces instead,” the challenge reads.
“Anyone can take something from this,” Ms. Orsborn Medina said. “It’s about how people are working in the modern age and dealing with this online onslaught.”
The mindful scroll
Distraught about all the time that evaporates while they’re absorbed in their screens, some people are seeking therapy for it.
When clients see Toronto psychotherapist Stephanie Thorson, they describe the common experience of looking up and realizing another 30 minutes, another 2 hours, have disappeared while they mindlessly scrolled.
“A lot of them feel frustrated and disappointed in themselves that time has slipped by and they’ve wasted it,” Ms. Thorson says. “They didn’t phone a friend or make the meal they thought they’d make. Some describe feeling duped and ashamed that the algorithm’s won.”
When people berate themselves, the therapist suggests a different approach. She applies the practice of mindfulness to phone use, to help people understand what’s happening in their hands. First, she asks clients to try and pause while scrolling. Next, to identify their emotional state, leaving any judgment aside. By that point, they can make a decision about what to do next, and move on.
Clients tell her these exercises help them inch down their screentime, especially at night. The process is about re-establishing control.
“Engineers have made this technology so attractive because they want to lull you into spending more time,” the therapist said. “The rebellion is to make a choice, rather than be lulled.”
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With some clients, she’ll use pie charts for a closer look at how they actually use their devices. Even though we use our devices for everything, we often end up mislabeling all our phone use as wasteful.
“Clients look at this device and go, ‘Oof. This is a problem.’ But which part is a problem?” Ms. Thorson said.
“Rather than lumping phone use into one activity, I invite people to track how they are using it. Do they use it for research, connecting with friends, making arrangements, inspiration, distraction, games, work, to be informed?”
Social media is the big time-suck for her clients. It’s also where the icky feelings happen, where we compare ourselves to others, seek attention and second-guess ourselves when our group chats don’t validate us.
The therapist asks clients to contrast this experience with the satisfaction and sense of purpose achievable when following leads for research at work. Or to compare how it feels when you take your dog for a walk in the woods, versus sitting on the couch, scrolling through newsreels about the Trump administration.
“It’s about taking stock, recognizing what’s happening right now, and making choices,” said Ms. Thorson, who leaves her phone at home when she walks.
