At the Centre for Digital Habits, we have spent over a decade doing research and building practical interventions to understand how to help people get back in control of their digital lives. This short reading list gathers some of the key books and papers we recommend for getting up to speed: why our devices are so hard to put down, how we got here, and what the evidence says actually helps.
The list is of course not comprehensive — just some landmark resources that capture signal in the noise. If you want to dig deeper, you can browse the full research of Dr Ulrik Lyngs and Dr Konrad Kollnig.
If you have questions, or a favourite resource you think we've missed, we'd love to hear from you at team@digitalhabits.org.
The history of attention capture, how tech companies learned to design habit-forming products, and how the perverse market incentives that have made the digital world worse over time.
Tim Wu · 2016
The bigger historical context of how we got here: A century-long history of the industries that harvest human attention for resale to advertisers — from early advertising and radio through TV to today’s social platforms.
Nir Eyal · 2014
The 'Hook Model' that explains (and taught the industry) how digital devices can build habits that keep people coming back. Essential reading for understanding the tricks that make our devices hard to put down.
Cory Doctorow · 2025
A clear account of how market incentives cause tech platforms to first court users, then court businesses, then squeeze both for profit and degrade the experience over time. Explains both why many digital services have become worse over time, and what regulation and interoperability could do about it.
Practical frameworks and evidence-based approaches to reclaim attention, individually and institutionally.
Nir Eyal · 2019
A blueprint for becoming indistractable: master the internal triggers that send you to your devices, plan your time around what you actually value, hack back external interruptions, and use pacts to hold yourself to it. A good read — even if many have pointed out the irony that Eyal first helped create the disease with Hooked, then went on to sell a cure.
Lyngs et al. · CHI 2024
Our own solution: a structured workshop where people reflect on their challenges, pick strategies that fit them, and get follow-up support to find what sticks. The foundations of our Design for Life workshop.
Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson · 2018
A "calm company" take on how to solve the underlying workplace challenges that leads to overwhelm and distraction. Argues that always-on culture, and burnout are design choices — and shows how fewer meetings, less urgency theatre, and protecting focus time can make digital work more sustainable.
What the evidence actually says about attention, self-control and wellbeing.
Orben & Matias · Science · 2025
Argues that research on digital tech harms is stuck in a failing cycle: technology reaches billions before science can assess the impact. A sharp guide to why headlines about phones and wellbeing so often outrun the evidence — and how the research system needs to change.
Lyngs et al. · CHI 2019
An example of how to study digital distraction solutions by investigating the myriad natural experiments that take place in the wild. Reviewed 367 digital focus tools and mapped their designs to a psychological model of self-regulation. The foundation of our tool collection.
Lyngs et al. · CHI 2020
An example of how to use mixed methods to test digital focus tools. Randomly assigned university students to various changes to Facebook's design (including no newsfeed and goal reminders). Combined objective usage data, fortnightly survey data, and interviews with all participants.