It’s no secret that our attention spans are shortening. We’ve become a society of instant gratification, where we want everything now and we don’t want to have to work for it. Unfortunately, this mentality doesn’t transfer over very well when it comes to learning.
How to put apps to sleep
One way to minimize distractions and focus on your work is to put your apps to sleep. This can be done on an iPhone or iPad by following these steps:
1. Go to the Settings app and select “General.”
2. Scroll down and select “Background App Refresh.”
3. Tap on any app that you want to stop refreshing in the background.
4. Select “Never” from the list of options.
5. Repeat these steps for each app that you want to stop refreshing in the background.
6. Return to your home screen and double tap the sleep/wake button until the red “slide to power off” bar appears. If you have a newer iOS device, this step may not be necessary as it sometimes shuts down on its own.
7. Swipe the red bar to the right to shut down your device completely.
8. Press the sleep/wake button again, or press and hold it if you can’t get it to wake up by pressing it normally.
9. When the Apple logo appears on screen, release your finger from this same button; do not hold it down for several seconds.
10. If you want to put any app back to sleep, repeat the above steps right from step 1 though step 5. Or you can just leave them how they are if you don’t ever plan on using them again.
How to put apps to sleep Regardless of how many things we try to cram into our days
Tere’s always going to be downtime in which we find ourselves without anything to do. This is how you can keep yourself from wasting time on your mobile device by putting your apps to sleep:
1. On the main home screen where all of your apps are displayed, tap and hold one app until it starts wiggling.
2. Drag the app up to the top of your screen until you see a small black bar appear just beneath your account picture in the upper-left corner. This will put the app into sleep mode, so if you ever have some downtime or are waiting for something, you can pull it back down onto the home screen and resume using it.
You can also delete apps that you don’t use often and just download them again when you need them. This will help to save space on your device and also stop the apps from refreshing in the background.
How it affects learning
The average person’s attention span has shortened to 8 seconds, which is shorter than that of a goldfish. As a result, we’ve become a society of instant gratification where we want everything now and we don’t want to have to work for it. This mentality doesn’t transfer over very well when it comes to learning. We need to be able to focus in order to learn, and that’s becoming more and more difficult with the constant distractions around us.