Scott D. Clary writes in Facebook -- https://www.facebook.com/scottdclarypage/posts/pfbid023eSG3YubbTfYsTgLkWxVbYi35pBT4VH5n2cGrXtF8yUrNZwoD1488TKzaAz5FcSnl :
The reason you can't focus isn't your phone. It's that you don't care enough about what you're working on. Nobody has a focus problem watching a movie they love. Attention isn't broken. Interest is missing.
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That's a good explanation for why I find it hard to focus on writing referee's reports for math. research journals. The interest is missing. I have been doing it for up to 35 years already, and have never been able to see any purpose served in this way. All my hopes have been getting dashed by experience all the time. The only result of me finding all those mistakes in submitted papers is that I receive ever more papers with more mistakes, while nobody extracts any lessons. The authors are uneducable, the editorial policies are unreformable, and the publishers don't care.
The reason you can't focus isn't your phone. It's that you don't care enough about what you're working on. Nobody has a focus problem watching a movie they love. Attention isn't broken. Interest is missing.
***
That's a good explanation for why I find it hard to focus on writing referee's reports for math. research journals. The interest is missing. I have been doing it for up to 35 years already, and have never been able to see any purpose served in this way. All my hopes have been getting dashed by experience all the time. The only result of me finding all those mistakes in submitted papers is that I receive ever more papers with more mistakes, while nobody extracts any lessons. The authors are uneducable, the editorial policies are unreformable, and the publishers don't care.