Restoring Balance and Productivity with Attention

WiFi and I could just completely disconnect from everything. So now you just like it when WiFi doesn't Then this week you're last week we hear from you know, Delta, that free WiFi for everyone, Right, I agree. I used to feel like the plane was the place where nobody could touch me. Well, how many times, everybody do you sit down to do something only to be distracted by the ping of your phone. You pick it up, you

look at the text. The next thing, Tim, you know, you're on Instagram watching videos of airplanes taking off and landing and forty minutes has passed. That's you. That's exactly what I do. And guess what that thing that I sat down to do. I never did it all right, Well, this is the subject of a new book, attention Span. Finding a Focus and Fighting Distraction, is by Dr Gloria Mark. She's Chancellor's Professor of Informatics at the University of California, California.

Excuse me at Irvine. She joins us now via zoom zoom from Irvine, California. I'm not distracted. I just can't speak on this Tuesday. Uh, Dr Mark, good to have you here. Congratulation, congratulations on the book. I do feel like we are living in a world of distractions, which is why I try to start my day with no sounds, no nothing, and just kind of some peace because the rest of the day there's so much coming at us. UM, welcome, welcome. Tell us about your book, Attention Span. So thank you

so much for having me. Uh So, you know, basically, this this work. The book is a culmination of about twenty years of research that I've been doing looking at how people interact with their devices. And one of the things I note is, and even started with myself, uh that my own attention was started to be dwindling when I was using my devices. I started, uh measuring people's attention span using their computers and then later when smartphones came out UM since UM around two thousand four, and

I find that the attention spans have diminished. Back in two thousand four, we measured them about two and a half minutes on average. The last five or six years it's been about forty seven seconds on average, and others have what does that mean? Forty seven seconds? What is the average attention span? Yes, this means that on any screen, computer, tablet, phone, an average of forty seven seconds is what we see. Now. Remember it's an average. Sometimes it's less, sometimes it's more.

The median, which is the midpoint, is forty seconds. That means half of all of our observations showed attention to be less than forty seconds. Well, I have to say, when we're working on putting something out on social if we do anything that's like they're like no, no, no no, twenty seconds or like thirty seconds, Like you've got to be really short, uh and fast. At the same time, you know, I think about the streaming services. We have more and more content and more and more series, and

we have more and more documentaries that are longer. So help me get my head around it. Where people are watching for long periods of time they are and and again, um, I want to emphasize that this is an average. So yes, people can spend you know, long periods of time. You can just be you know, engulfed in in some video for a longer period of time. But what we also

see is that people are shifting their attention rapidly. You know, this is when they're not watching videos and uh, you know they're not watching TV and film and uh, this is you know, I I describe this as a kinetic attention kinetic dynamic kind of behavior that we see. So have have our brains or do our brains change as a result of all the stimuli that we have in our environment? Well, there there's some research that suggests that

there there could be some changes to our brain. What what I can say is that there are changes to our behavior, to our attention behaviors. And and that's uh something that we can you know, empirically measure and show. We also show that there's a relationship between this fast attention shifting and an increase in stress. So okay, how about behavior change? Because I want to know how I can and I noticed this. I just sometimes I'll delete Twitter from my phone because I know I'm spending too

much time on it. Even though the app is no longer on my phone, sometimes I'll still open up my phone instinctively when I'm like on an escalator in an elevator or something, and then try to find Twitter, even though I know it's not there. It's like a reflex format sickness. Please please help me, doctor. Yeah, it's it's a muscle memory. I mean, you know, when you do something for a long time, it becomes a habit. Uh.

So there, you know. And I want to emphasize that we we tend to blame notifications for you know, this is the reason why we're distracted, but it's just as likely for people to interrupt themselves. So about half the time people we are our worst interrupters. Uh, you know, So it's not we can't just blame it on things

that are external to us. Children as young as two to four years old already average two and a half hours of screen time a day, and it soon climbs to an average of three hours and five minutes for ages five to eight. Uh. Foundation from multitasking laid at the very youngest of ages. Remember when multitasking um dr mark was considered a good thing, but you know, the research shows that it's not. There's actually it's actually research that's been going on for decades that shows that when

people switch their attention two different tasks. We know that blood pressure goes up. There are physiological markers that indicate stress that show this this goes up as well. We know my own research looking at people in the wild where they wore heart rate monitors. We find that stress goes up when people are switching their attention, and people report subjectively that their stress is higher. So all these

measures are consistent. So I guess I want to go back to this idea of retraining ourselves and thinking about how we can be more productive. Because there's this idea that we're so productive because we're connected and we can always access our emails or contacts our tasks. But there's also this idea that if you know, hey, you retrain yourself to be more focused on these things and you actually sit there, you get that task done, you're more productive.

So how do we find focus and fight distraction? Which is the subtitle of your book. Yes, so I think that we need to do work on different levels there. You know, there are individual solutions, there are also collective solutions that could be done at an organizational level or even societal level. At an individual level, I think that we can draw in the work of Albert band Or. He's a very famous social psychologist who had a lot of success in getting people to improve their self effocacy.

They could change, they could stop smoking, stop substance abuse, and I think there are certain principles that could be applied to help us, you know, control our attention better. For example, we have so many automatic actions. We we grab our phones, which check em we check social media.

These are done automatically. If we can become more intentional in our behavior so we can make these unconscious behaviors more conscious then, you know, and we can understand the reasons why we're doing them, then it gives us a chance to be able to gain control over them. If we don't do that and just got about forty five seconds, what's the risk. The risk is we continue switching our attention,

creating stress, you know, even exhaustion live in it. I will say that I will sometimes just not look at my messages when I've got to get something done and just focus on it, and then people will be like, why aren't you answering your messages? And I'm like, I'm trying to get something done. I think the reflective part is something that you know, I really have to be

intentional about. Yeah. Absolutely, Our thanks to Dr Gloria Mark, Chancellor's professor of informatics at University of California, Irvine, her new book Attention Span, Finding Focus and Finding Distraction. We thank her for her time today