The first time I noticed how much my attention had drifted, I was halfway through a paragraph and could not have told you what the previous sentence had said. I read it again. The same thing happened.
This was not a new article or a particularly demanding one. It was, in fact, one I had chosen specifically because it was easy. The mismatch between what I expected to be able to do — pay attention to a few hundred words of prose — and what I was actually doing was the point at which I started taking the problem seriously.
What I tried, after a few false starts, was a kind of forced linearity. Tools that present one word at a time, in one place, at a pace you cannot easily speed past. The idea is to remove the option to skip ahead, because skipping ahead was exactly the habit I was trying to break.
It worked, mostly. Not because the technique itself was magic, but because it changed the texture of the problem. Instead of fighting to focus on a page of text, I was just waiting for the next word. The job got smaller, and so did the failure modes.
I do not use it for everything. Reference material, code, anything where you need to backtrack — those still call for a normal page. But for the long-form articles that used to defeat me, this kind of reader has become genuinely useful. Not because reading faster is intrinsically good, but because finishing what you started is.