One of the most fascinating insights I've discovered about myself. This is how my attention span (and probably yours) decreases rapidly throughout the day.

I've been tracking every single event I do on my computer using @rize_io and exported the data to @graphext

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Rize captures every single session I do on my laptop. Every time I jump from one app or web to another one, it records the time spent there and classifies them into categories following my own taxonomy.

This is how it summarizes a day on my computer. Really useful and beautiful

So I used their export feature to get all the raw data from the past 3 months:

151 hours, 47741 sessions to analyze it with http://graphext.com  and see if I could find some interesting insights about my relationship with the computer, where I spent most of my life...

So the first thing I tried was to plot the hour of the day against the avg time spent per event and the result is on avg I jump from one page to another every 45 seconds, but the median is only 16 seconds!

And it is constant throughout the past 3 months... always 16 seconds!

60% of the time I use any webpage or app I spent only between 15 and 20 seconds before I jump or check another app, that seems to be my baseline to focus on a single page. Most of the time I switch the page to look for more information about the task I am doing at that moment

But very often I switch to a completely different task. There is no easy way to predict whether that jump belongs to the same task or a different one, it's a very complex thing to do automatically...

I also visualized what categories of apps I have longer sessions with more focus. And of course, video conferencing wins, if you are talking to someone you don't do anything else but for no more than 3 minutes, even on most meetings I share my screen, search for more info...

The second one where I spent most time without switching to another app is on @Pitch (an app for designing slides for presentations), preview (the Mac app for reading PDFs), design (Figma), notes apps, Notion... and the least are Google search and photos and social media

I see a clear correlation between the length of the session on a page with being in a state of creativity (elaborating thoughts via writing, designing, coding, analyzing) vs searching and getting info.

So coming back to this chart I thought the decrease in my attention span per page was explained by the fact that after 4pm I usually stop creating things and go more into consuming information mode...

But I controlled by categories and I still see a similar decrease in attention

So I remembered the well-studied phenomena of "ego depletion": our willpower and self-control dramatically decrease as our energy for mental activity decreases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion

To me, this is the most possible explanation for the decrease in the avg time spent per page

I also found super interesting how my avg time spent by page/app (my focus) increases again after dinner.
My suspicion is, that this is a mix of getting way fewer notifications from messages apps + being more relaxed after getting some rest

So my main conclusions are:
- Definitely schedule the most creative tasks early in the day or late at night.
- Maybe taking a nap (siesta) might restore my ego depletion after lunch, but even though I am Spanish I haven't taken one since I was in High School