Research
Everyone plans.
Few follow through.
It is not a motivation problem. It is a noise problem. These are the studies and books Floe is built on.
What the studies found
19%
still kept the promise they made themselves two years on.
A University of Scranton study followed about 200 adults who made New Year’s resolutions. After two years, roughly one in five were still keeping theirs.
John Norcross, University of Scranton46%
were still on course after six months.
A second Scranton study, published in 2002, found that fewer than half of people who made a resolution were still keeping it at the six-month mark.
University of Scranton, 200247 sec
is how long we stay on one screen before we switch.
Gloria Mark has measured attention on screens for two decades. The average time on one screen fell from about two and a half minutes in 2004 to about 47 seconds.
Gloria Mark, University of California, Irvine20+ min
to get back to a task after one interruption.
Mark’s earlier work on interrupted work found it takes more than twenty minutes to return to the original task. Sources differ on the exact figure, so we do not quote one.
Gloria Mark, University of California, Irvine41%
of to-do list items were never completed.
From iDoneThis, a productivity app, looking at its own users’ lists. It is a company’s data, not an independent study.
iDoneThis
Reading behind Floe
Attention Span
Two decades of measuring how attention breaks up on screens, and what helps it return.
Why Floe treats distraction as something to design around.
Changeology
From the researcher behind the resolution studies: how people who do change go about it.
Why a plan in Floe always has a next step and a time.
Stolen Focus
The case that distraction is done to us, and is not a personal failing.
Why Floe never lectures and never shames.
Indistractable
Turning a plan into action by removing what triggers the drift.
Why Floe holds back the apps you choose while you focus.
Deep Work
One thing with your full attention, treated as a skill worth protecting.
Why the focus timer takes the whole screen.
Atomic Habits
Why small systems close the gap between meaning to and doing.
Why Floe shows what you made room for at the end of the day.
How we use numbers
We only quote a figure when we can name where it comes from. The resolution studies are about New Year’s resolutions, not every kind of plan, and they are decades old. One figure here is a company’s own data. We say so beside each one.
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