Most writing on this subject arrives with a moral position attached, and the position gets in the way of the explanation. This piece has no view on whether you should use these products. It has a view on how they work and what a switch costs, and it assumes you can draw your own conclusion.
The design, plainly
Three properties, each ordinary on its own.
Variable reward. The next item in a feed is sometimes worth seeing and never predictable. Reinforcement that arrives on an unpredictable schedule sustains a behaviour more durably than reinforcement that arrives every time — a finding that predates any of these products by decades and comes out of behavioural psychology. A feed is that schedule, delivered by a thumb.
Infinite supply. There is no bottom. Every previous medium had an edge: the paper ended, the programme finished, the album stopped. An endless feed removes the moment where continuing becomes a decision, and a decision you never have to make is a decision you never make in your favour.
Interruption on someone else’s schedule. A notification is a claim on your attention timed by a system whose interests are not yours. It does not know what you were doing. It is not supposed to.
None of these is a trick. They are competent engineering aimed at a metric, and the metric is your attention. The phrase attention economy is not a metaphor; attention is the thing being bought, and the products are the acquisition channel.
Why willpower is the wrong frame
If you frame this as a contest of will, you have already accepted a matchup you will lose. On one side, a person deciding many times a day. On the other, a system refined continuously against behavioural data from an enormous number of people.
The framing also leads to the wrong intervention. Willpower thinking produces try harder. Design thinking produces reduce the number of times the decision has to be made, which is the only approach with a track record.
This is not absolution. You are the one who picks up the phone. It is a claim about where the leverage is, and the leverage is not in the moment of temptation.
What the research actually measured
Here is where this article has to be careful, because this territory contains one of the most misquoted numbers in modern work advice.
Attention duration has fallen
Gloria Mark’s group at UC Irvine has observed knowledge workers in real workplaces since the early 2000s, recording how long people stay on one screen before switching. Their reported figures show a substantial decline over two decades: around two and a half minutes in the early measurements, roughly seventy-five seconds by the early 2010s, and under a minute in more recent work.
Observed. What these studies establish is that in the workplaces they observed, over the period they observed, screen-attention durations fell markedly.
What they do not establish is that human attention spans have shortened as a capacity. The measurement is of behaviour in a specific environment, with specific tools, under specific demands. A person whose job now involves eleven communication channels will switch more often without anything having changed inside their head.
Returning takes longer than the interruption
The second finding is the one that has escaped its context.
Mark’s research reported that after an interruption, people took an average of around twenty-three minutes to return to the original task, and typically worked on two other tasks in between.
That number now circulates as it takes 23 minutes to refocus, stated as a constant, usually with no citation, often attached to claims the study never made. So, precisely:
- It is an average across many observed interruptions, not a fixed cost.
- It measures time until the original task is resumed, which includes intervening work. It is not a measure of how long your brain takes to reassemble itself.
- It comes from workplace observation, and the interruptions studied were real workplace interruptions, not laboratory pings.
The finding is genuinely important. It is important in the specific way it was measured, and repeating it as a universal law does the underlying work a disservice.
Switching leaves residue
Separately, Sophie Leroy’s 2009 studies found that when people switch tasks before finishing, part of their attention stays with the first task and performance on the second suffers. She named this attention residue. The effect was more pronounced when the first task was unfinished or under time pressure.
Observed, and it supplies the mechanism the resumption figure only describes from the outside. You do not merely take a while to get back. You come back diminished for a period, and that period is not visible in any calendar.
The switch ledger
Put those together and consider one ordinary morning: nine interruptions between nine and noon. Some external, some your own.
The arithmetic that circulates would multiply nine by twenty-three and conclude your morning was destroyed several times over, which is obviously wrong and is what happens when an average is treated as a constant. Interruptions overlap. Some resumptions are instant. Some tasks were nearly done anyway.
Here is the honest version. Each switch carries two costs. A visible one — the duration of the interruption, which you notice — and an invisible one, the residue, which you do not. The invisible cost is what makes a morning of small interruptions feel disproportionately unproductive relative to the minutes lost.
What we are inferring. That the residue effect and the resumption findings compound across a fragmented morning is inferred. No study we are aware of has measured the cumulative cost of a specific day's switching. What is observed is that each mechanism exists. The claim that they add up is reasonable and unproven, and we would rather say so than convert two real findings into a false statistic.
The finding that complicates the story
If the story were only about platforms doing something to us, removing the platforms would end it. It does not.
Mark’s observational work found that a large share of interruptions are self-initiated — people switch away without any external prompt. When external interruptions fall, self-interruptions tend to rise to occupy the space.
That is inconvenient for the villain narrative and useful for anyone actually trying to work. It means blocking the feeds closes one door, and there is a second door on the inside. The four doors piece is about that arrangement in practical terms.
What follows from all this
Not much, morally. This article is not going to tell you what your relationship with these products should be, because that depends on things about your life we do not know.
Structurally, three things follow.
Reduce entry points, not urges. Every removed notification, every signed-out browser profile, every phone left in another room removes a decision rather than requiring you to win it. Decisions you do not have to make are the only ones you never lose.
Batch the checking rather than banning it. A designated window is a real answer. Attempting never to check is a plan that ends in one long unplanned session, usually at the worst moment.
Protect one hour completely. Not the day. One hour where none of it can reach you. The value is partly the hour’s output and partly the information: an hour with no feeds in it tells you very quickly whether the feeds were the problem.
The feeds are not a moral test you keep failing. They are a well-built system for acquiring something you have a limited amount of, and the response to a system is structural, not heroic.
If, having removed the entry points, you still cannot work — and many people cannot — then the feeds were the visible cause rather than the actual one. The next piece is a diagnosis.