Episode description

I’m convinced that attention is the most important human faculty. Your life, after all, is just the sum total of the things you’ve paid attention to. We lament our attention issues all the time — how distracted we are, how drained we feel, how hard it is to stay focused or present. And yet, while there’s no shortage of advice on how to improve our sleep hygiene or spending habits or physical fitness, there’s hardly any good information about how to build and replenish our capacity for paying attention.

Gloria Mark is a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of the book “Attention Span.” And she’s one of the few people who have deeply studied the way our attention works, how that’s been changing and what we can do to stop frittering away our attention budgets. 

This was our first release of 2024, a kind of New Year’s resolutions episode. And since it can sometimes help to be reminded of the intentions with which you began your year — especially in the midst of a high-intensity election season — we thought we’d share it again. 

Book recommendations:

“The Challenger Launch Decision” by Diane Vaughan

“The Undoing Project” by Michael Lewis

“The God Equation” by Michio Kaku

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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