Mark 2023 looks at this, I’ve summarized the relevant stuff at the end of this section, and the time spent per task has indeed been declining. I don’t know about research looking at task classification, but that would be interesting to do.
My current take is that this provides medium evidence—but I think this could also be evidence of higher ability at priorization.
Better at getting specific information out of a present piece of information (e.g. becoming skilled at skimming), better at putting tasks aside when they need some time to be processed in the background.
I would buy that hypothesis if the data was less time between switches within work-related tasks, but if the pattern is more frequent visits to entertainment sites during work hours, that sure doesn’t sound like a good thing to me. Yeah maybe it’s wisely letting stuff process in the background while I browse reddit or less wrong, but very likely it just is what it appears to be- degraded attention span and/or I creased internet addiction.
Mark 2023 looks at this, I’ve summarized the relevant stuff at the end of this section, and the time spent per task has indeed been declining. I don’t know about research looking at task classification, but that would be interesting to do.
My current take is that this provides medium evidence—but I think this could also be evidence of higher ability at priorization.
Higher ability at prioritization? What do you mean?
Better at getting specific information out of a present piece of information (e.g. becoming skilled at skimming), better at putting tasks aside when they need some time to be processed in the background.
I would buy that hypothesis if the data was less time between switches within work-related tasks, but if the pattern is more frequent visits to entertainment sites during work hours, that sure doesn’t sound like a good thing to me. Yeah maybe it’s wisely letting stuff process in the background while I browse reddit or less wrong, but very likely it just is what it appears to be- degraded attention span and/or I creased internet addiction.