The good news: It’s not too late to reclaim your attention span and find your focus. And if you’re worried you’ll have to ditch your phone and go cold turkey with social media, rest assured — that’s one thing she doesn’t recommend.
Read on to discover a few ways to increase your well-being and productivity that might surprise you (including why some popular methods, like the Pomodoro technique, might not be for everyone). If you’re looking to focus beyond 47 seconds, it’s time well-spent.
Q: When you’re studying our attention spans, what do you take into account?
Gloria Mark: I study what’s called human-computer interaction, which is how people interact with devices.
For more than 20 years, I’ve been looking at how our attention is affected when we’re looking at screens. How long does our attention linger on any screen, whether it’s a computer or a phone? How is the stress we experience during different on-screen activities correlated?
I look at how all this affects us psychologically in terms of our behavior, our stress, our attention and multitasking.
Q: When you started this work did you realize that screens were going to take over our lives?
GM: I never envisioned we would be using screens this much!
When I first started studying this, I had an awareness of my own attachment to screens. But I started measuring attention before smartphones, before Facebook and Twitter, before all of these social media giants came on the scene. E-commerce was still in its early stages. Even Google had only been around since 1998. I really didn’t foresee what it would be today.
Q: Your research really covers the information revolution basically from start to present! How has that evolved in the past 20 years, and how is it affecting us?
GM: My first paper on this subject was published in 2004 from a study conducted in 2003. We found attention spans on screens to average two-and-a-half minutes. In other words, we could focus and stay on one screen for 150 seconds, on average, before moving away.
Then social media came along, online gaming, just a wider variety of things for people to do on the internet. Smartphones, invented in 2007, really took away our attention. During all this, we kept studying human-computer interaction.
By the time you get to 2020, we find the average attention paid to a single screen is 47 seconds.
This has been replicated by multiple researchers. Taking all these studies together from 2016 till 2020, right before the pandemic started, that average comes to 47 seconds, a very clear difference.
A lot has happened. But as I point out in my book “Attention Span,” everyone tends to blame tech companies and algorithms, and that’s certainly a big part of it, but it’s not the only part.
Q: Why else might our attention spans have decreased so dramatically?
GM: It turns out half the time we interrupt ourselves! We self-interrupt because we’re just so tempted to look up information or we’re tempted to check email. We’re tempted to post something on social media. Very often we forget that we need to take care of something.
I argue that the design of the internet with its node and link structure is conducive to distraction because information is organized in terms of associations. And if you go to a Wikipedia page, you read a topic, you see a link, you click on that link to find out more.
The design of the internet maps very well with semantic memory theory, the idea that memory is organized in terms of making associations between concepts. Our brains are primed for that.
If information were organized differently, like an actual library, with the Dewey Decimal system, it wouldn’t be so easy to surf the web.
Then there are personality differences. Some people are very good at self-regulation, others aren’t. There are emotional and social reasons that help explain why we get distracted. Those are big ones. We’re social beings. We’re curious. We seek social rewards.
There are a lot of reasons other than just tech companies and algorithms, although that’s a big one, but it’s not the only one.
Q: I think about the different ways I’ve used Wikipedia or TikTok and sometimes it seems like a good exercise for well-being or cognitive learning capacity, right? It’s not all bad.
GM: Getting rid of social media altogether is one option, but we find that people are happiest when they can do mindless, easy, engaging activities. Maya Angelou talked about her big mind and her little mind — her big mind encompassed the deep thought she put into her writing, and her little mind focused on crosswords or other kinds of puzzles as a way of giving her big mind a rest. I love those terms.
If you come out of a difficult meeting and your mind is racing, it’s okay to do something easy and engaging to give yourself a chance to reset.
The problem is when we get trapped. We end up going down a rabbit hole with social media, or we can’t pull away from a game. It’s really important to put a time limit on those activities.