Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Screens and attention
In practice that means breaking a long stretch into shorter ones with something marking the end of each, changing what the work looks like part way through, and putting a small checkpoint in the middle instead of saving everything for the finish. It is not a concession or a watered down version of the task. It is a design that matches what an hour of attention actually looks like now.
Men who are not distracted, either by commerce or profit, from remembering God, keeping up the prayer (Quran 24:37). The prayer holds through a busy day because it is fixed and repeated, not because anyone is concentrating harder.
النور
رِجَالࣱ لَّا تُلۡهِيهِمۡ تِجَٰرَةࣱ وَلَا بَيۡعٌ عَن ذِكۡرِ ٱللَّهِ وَإِقَامِ ٱلصَّلَوٰةِ وَإِيتَآءِ ٱلزَّكَوٰةِ يَخَافُونَ يَوۡمࣰ ا تَتَقَلَّبُ فِيهِ ٱلۡقُلُوبُ وَٱلۡأَبۡصَٰرُ
men who are not distracted, either by commerce or profit, from remembering God, keeping up the prayer, and paying the prescribed alms, fearing a day when hearts and eyes will turn over
Qur’an 24:37read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In randomised experiments, breaking an online lecture up with short memory tests reduced mind wandering and improved what people learned. That is a structural change to the material rather than an appeal to willpower, which is the part worth carrying across. The setting was online lectures with students, so how much it would do for your own reading, or for the homework you set, is not something these studies can tell you.
Szpunar KK, Khan NY, Schacter DL. (2013). Interpolated memory tests reduce mind wandering and improve learning of online lectures.. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Attention drifts when nothing arrives for a long time, so putting something in the middle gives it somewhere to land.
Ask your child to show you their feed and explain it to you. You are asking to be taught rather than to inspect, and from the other side those feel nothing like each other.
Nobody is asking you to want less of a lift. The ask is to take some of it from somewhere that does not leave you flat afterwards.
For some people the online part is not a side issue sitting next to the depression or the anxiety. It is one of the things holding them in place.