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Attention & Information Diet Attention as the budget everything else is spent through: why feeds and notifications win, what switching and a nearby phone cost, news and noise versus signal, deep reading on screens, the social media evidence taught as a debate, and the practices (curation, batching, fasts, audits) that take the hours back.
43 cards · space to flip · 1–4 to grade · d to go deeper
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Reading list The works this deck draws on, in the order worth reading them. Cards point to a specific chapter or paper where one fits.
01 Book Digital Minimalism · Cal Newport, 2019 The best starting point for the diet side: the any-benefit argument, the thirty-day declutter, and the case for choosing tools against your values rather than their features. 02 Book Deep Work · Cal Newport, 2016 The attention-training side: why undistracted concentration is valuable and scarce, and the rule on embracing boredom that this deck leans on. The habits deck lists it too; one reading serves both. 03 Book Attention Span · Gloria Mark, 2023 The measurements: decades of observing how people actually switch, interrupt themselves, and recover. The corrective to opinion on both sides of the argument. 04 Book Reader, Come Home · Maryanne Wolf, 2018 What deep reading is, how screens reshape the reading circuit, and how she retrained her own. Written as letters; the middle ones carry the science. 05 Book The Shallows · Nicholas Carr, 2010 The original argument that the medium reshapes the mind that uses it. Some of the neuroscience has aged; the history of reading and the central argument have not. 06 Book Amusing Ourselves to Death · Neil Postman, 1985 Television rather than phones, and still the sharpest account of how a medium decides what counts as information. The source of the information-action ratio. 07 Book Stolen Focus · Johann Hari, 2022 A readable tour of the researchers in this deck and the easiest way in. Some of its sourcing and claims have been criticised, so treat it as a map and check anything you plan to repeat. 08 Paper Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One's Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity · Adrian Ward, Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy and Maarten Bos, 2017 The experiment behind the phone-in-another-room rule. A later replication attempt found no effect, so read it as suggestive rather than settled. 