I can give you one secret, which is that despite what you hear in the press, the phone can be a double-edged sword, one that can also cut for you, instead of against you, with just a bit of discipline. Non-zero discipline, but not impossible amounts of discipline. With a book-reading app, you can get through anything, even War and Peace, in ten minutes here, ten minutes there, and maybe 40 minutes in the evening if you can scrape it together.
I'm saying this not because I lack the attention span to read for three hours, because I still can... the problem is assembling those three hours when you've got a job and young kids.
I've also been learning a foreign language for about an hour a day over the past year and a half, and believe me, very few of those hours have been contiguous. But I can recover five minutes here and five minutes there, and finish up in the evening, and I'm making real progress. (Unlike reading, where the attention being cut up will diminish the impact, once you're memorizing vocab and such, it's actually possible that breaking it up throughout the day is a benefit rather than the same amount of time in one block. It may help convince your brain that what you're doing is important and shouldn't be discarded, because it keeps coming up, rather than being something it can compartmentalize easily.)
With a bit of creativity you can turn this to your benefit, or at the very least, somewhat to your benefit rather than merely to your continued disadvantage.
I had pretty much stopped reading for enjoyment before smart phones. Have plowed through a bunch of books now thanks to the Kindle app. It's a combination of always being with you, remembering where you were across devices, and being able to adjust the font size to whatever's comfortable at the time. The kids getting older doesn't hurt either :-).
I'm saying this not because I lack the attention span to read for three hours, because I still can... the problem is assembling those three hours when you've got a job and young kids.
I've also been learning a foreign language for about an hour a day over the past year and a half, and believe me, very few of those hours have been contiguous. But I can recover five minutes here and five minutes there, and finish up in the evening, and I'm making real progress. (Unlike reading, where the attention being cut up will diminish the impact, once you're memorizing vocab and such, it's actually possible that breaking it up throughout the day is a benefit rather than the same amount of time in one block. It may help convince your brain that what you're doing is important and shouldn't be discarded, because it keeps coming up, rather than being something it can compartmentalize easily.)
With a bit of creativity you can turn this to your benefit, or at the very least, somewhat to your benefit rather than merely to your continued disadvantage.