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Books That Fixed My Attention Span
15
items The books that actually changed how I engage with the internet, in the order I'd hand them to someone. Start with The Shallows and see if you still recognise your own attention span afterwards.
Sections
3
Must reads
If you have more time
For the really invested
Must reads
The absolute must reads to walk away with the key ideas
A good place to start. Carr's argument isn't about what you read online, it's about what all that skimming does to your ability to read anything long afterwards. I started noticing it in myself about thirty pages in, which was not a comfortable exper...
The Shallows: What the Internet Does to Brains
I found this one very help to snap out of the mindless scrolling and be more deliberate with my internet and technology consumption. Another great one from Cal!
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life
The book to pick up if you want a strategy to actually work through the distractions and remain in control of your attention.
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success
Short, blunt, and you'll finish it in an evening! Lanier helped build this world so he knows where the bodies are buried. Four thousand reviews and the most persuasive short book here.
Ten Arguments for Deleting Social Media
If you have more time
Less about your brain, more about why every app you use was built to work this way, to compete for your attention. A good introduction to start identifying and recognising these sly attention hooks!
Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention
An internet detox can feel … interesting. This book broke it down for me and explained why the first fortnight of cutting back feels genuinely so hard and then suddenly doesn't.
Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in Indulgence
If you are anything like me… every waking moment feels like you need to be productive. Sometimes the art lies in simply doing nothing at all. A hard thing I've had to be more conscious of but this one helps lay it all out!
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
A helpful read to understand why all of this got so much worse after 2010!
The Anxious Generation - Haidt
My book rec if you just want the practical steps
How to Break Up with Your Phone
Not a phone book at all, and that's exactly why it works! Burkeman's point is that you get about four thousand weeks alive, so trying to do everything is the actual problem. Fourteen thousand reviews.
Four Thousand Weeks - Burkeman
The one about other people. Turkle's research is on what happens to conversation and empathy when a phone is face down on the table, which none of the others really cover.
Reclaiming Conversation - Turkle
The business side of it! Alter is a marketing professor, so this is less about your brain and more about how the hooks get designed in the first place. Read it if you want to be annoyed at product teams.
Irresistible - Adam Alter
For the really invested
The newest book here and the one that reframes the whole problem: attention isn't just something you lose, it's something being extracted from you on purpose. Read it after Stolen Focus, they build on each other really well.
The Sirens' Call - Chris Hayes
Written in 1985, before the internet existed, and somehow still the sharpest thing on this list! Postman was writing about television, but swap in TikTok and almost nothing changes. Proof this isn't a new problem, just a faster one.
Amusing Ourselves to Death
The history bit. Wu traces how attention got bought and sold, from newspapers to radio to your feed. Pairs beautifully with the Postman if you want the long view rather than the latest panic.
The Attention Merchants - Tim Wu