John Burn-Murdoch

So I think part of that is just that there is go-to evidence that there are strategies here that do work.

The other thing I think about is that, again, if we believe that digital distraction is part of this,

then there are a wealth of strategies as well that people can use, right?

So everyone talks about putting your smartphone in another room when you go to bed.

So your sleep quality improves.

That simple act, better sleep, enables you to be better at delivering on your own goals.

If you put your phone more in do-not-disturb mode, something as simple as that, again, fewer distractions, you're more likely to deliver on your goals.

And I have this...

This at the moment is a column in waiting, as it were, when I can find the data, but wondering whether we might soon start to see screen time coming down, certainly for a section of society, because there's so much discourse at the moment about the harms it might be causing.

And I think if we saw that, again, to the extent that we think that's a key mechanism here, we could see simply through the reduction in distractions or reduction in displacement,

conscientiousness on the rise you know more more time um interacting with people in person more need to to really sort of deliver on on goals um to show up literally um i think could help

I think the particularly tricky thing we've got here is that the very device that is doing a lot of the distracting is the device that is also used to capture what people are doing with their lives.

One of the problems we have is that if you are

out there taking selfies or making your fairly curated instagram grid um you are not doing the input the big in-person deep tie social activities that we're talking about here or at least you're doing less of them and so the main technology the main means through which people get a sense of sort of what the culture is and what other people are doing

It almost excludes by default the much more deep social stuff, right?

That sort of dinner around the table with your mates is probably not on Instagram.

But the selfie or the sort of heavily curated Instagram boyfriend picture, that kind of thing is.

And so...

There feels like something inherent in the way we document our lives at the moment, which just makes it really hard to see the actually really meaningful, deeper stuff.

And so the closest I've got to an answer at the moment on something that might change is,