Gloria Mark's research team has been measuring the same thing since 2004: how long people focus on a single screen before switching to something else. In 2004 it was two and a half minutes. By 2012 it had fallen to 75 seconds. Her most recent measurements put it at 47 seconds — under a minute, and still dropping.
This isn't just "kids these days"
It's tempting to file this under generational change, but Mark's data covers the same population over two decades, not a comparison between old and young. The environment changed the behavior. More notification-driven apps, more competing surfaces, more things engineered to interrupt — the attention span didn't decline on its own, it got trained down by twenty years of an environment optimized to fragment it.
Forty-seven seconds isn't enough time to do most things well
Real work — writing, reading closely, actually thinking through a problem — takes sustained attention measured in tens of minutes, not tens of seconds. An attention span trained down to 47-second cycles isn't a minor inconvenience for that kind of work. It's structurally incompatible with it. You can't write a difficult paragraph in the gaps between reflexive phone checks.
What actually reverses this, per the research
The pattern that shrank attention spans was environmental, so the fix that's had the most support in the same research is also environmental — deliberately removing the interrupting surfaces rather than trying to out-focus them. That's the reasoning behind Appblox's insights view: it's not just a screen time tally, it's a heatmap of when your attention is actually getting fragmented across the day, so blocking gets pointed at the specific windows doing the most damage instead of applied as a blunt, all-day restriction.