Digital self‐control interventions for distracting media multitasking ‐ A systematic review

Digital distractions can interfere with goal attainment and lead to undesirable habits that are hard to get red rid of. Various digital self‐control interventions promise support to alleviate the negative impact of digital distractions. These interventions use different approaches, such as the blocking of apps and websites, goal setting, or visualizations of device usage statistics. While many apps and browser extensions make use of these features, little is known about their effectiveness. This systematic review synthesizes the current research to provide insights into the effectiveness of the different kinds of interventions. From a search of the ‘ACM’, ‘Springer Link’, ‘Web of Science’, ’IEEE Xplore’ and ‘Pubmed’ databases, we identified 28 digital self‐control interventions. We categorized these interventions according to their features and their outcomes. The interventions showed varying degrees of effectiveness, and especially interventions that relied purely on increasing the participants' awareness were barely effective. For those interventions that sanctioned the use of distractions, the current literature indicates that the sanctions have to be sufficiently difficult to overcome, as they will otherwise be quickly dismissed. The overall confidence in the results is low, with small sample sizes, short study duration, and unclear study contexts. From these insights, we highlight research gaps and close with suggestions for future research. Lay Description What is already known about this topic? Learners spend a considerable amount of time using digital distractions like social media or video websites. Excessive media multitasking with digital distractions is associated with worse academic performance. There is a variety of digital self‐control interventions that aimto alleviate the negative impact of digital distractions. These tools rely on vastly different mechanisms with unknown effectiveness. What this paper adds? This review provides an overview of the evidence for existing digital self‐control interventions. The interventions utilize different attention pathways, and they use varying degrees of strictness to reduce access to digital distractions. Interventions that rely purely on usage visualizations are not effective at reducing usage of digital distractions. Blocking mechanisms are implemented with varying strictness.. Blocking that is negotiable only works if it is not too easy to overcome. Implications for practice and/or policy Effectiven