No More Distractions [update]

An occasional subject of these endeavors is the non-productivity of GUI "productivity" programs in the PC/Mac arena. I've made reference to studies going back to early Word showing that WYSIWYG does little to improve quality of content. From personal experience, folks get enamored of playing with fonts and other filigrees. Attention to content actually goes down (and that paper is from 1999; I read others earlier).

For what it is worth, in my opinion as somebody who used Word for several years before switching to TeX, and who has a keen interest in typesetting, no worthwhile features have been introduced into MS Word for Windows since version 2.0 of circa 1990.

[update]
Another take on the issue (and the comments are a stitch):

[Word] guarantees job security for the guru, not transparency for the zen adept who wishes to focus on the task in hand, not the tool with which the task is to be accomplished.

The way we got control of it was to give people a workflow that said "don't bother about any formatting whilst you write". No headlines, no figures, as basic and unadorned as possible. This had the advantage that they could use anything they liked to generate it.
-- Comment 10 of post

Well, a couple of recent stabs at that pinata for your amusement. From some time now, turning off the color bling.

To combat phone addiction, Harris suggests enabling grayscale on your phone.

Then, today, Farhad Manjoo has his take on the problem. Reaches the same conclusion, not surprising.

Companies that make money from your attention — that is, ad-supported apps like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube — now employ armies of people who work with supercomputers to hook you ever more deeply into their services.

One of the side effects of Data Science is its complicity in manipulation of "users". Doesn't sound much like science to me. The end of Western Civilization is before our eyes.