How To Take Control Of Your Attention - Dr Gloria Mark - #584

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Gloria Mark. She's the Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California and an author whose research focuses on human-computer interaction. Not being able to focus and suffering with distracted attention is one of the most common complaints amongst people in the modern world. The ability to stay focused on a single task for a long period of time is hugely beneficial and yet has never been more difficult to achieve. Expect to learn what attention actually is and how it works, the average amount of time that people spend on a single task in the modern world, why attention is so easy to distract, whether multitasking is actually a thing, how to take back control from your distractions, how to deal with guilt around being distracted, the best way to design your daily routine for maximum focus, and much more. Really, really cool episode here. Very much needed by pretty much everybody, myself included, and Dr. Gloria Mark is one of the leaders in this research field. So yeah, very, very happy to have had her on the show today. If you are new here or if you're a long time listener, please make sure that you have hit the subscribe button. It really does support the show. It helps me get even bigger and better guests, and it makes me very happy indeed. So go and press it. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr Gloria Mark.
I would guess that managing my attention and the associated trials and tribulations that I go through trying to achieve that is probably the most common challenge that I face on a daily basis. And I also think that it's one that a lot of other people will resonate with as well. They don't need to be a podcaster, but just attention is something that feels to me to be slipping through my fingers on a second by second basis.

**Gloria Mark** (2:07)
Yeah, and that's what our research shows. And I've been studying this for a very long time for about two decades. And yeah, you are not alone. There are many, many people who share your concern.

**Chris Williamson** (2:22)
Given that you've been studying it for quite a while, have you looked at any longitudinal stuff to do with this? Have we had degradation over time? Is it worse now than it was 20 years ago?

**Gloria Mark** (2:32)
Yes, as a matter of fact, I have. So I first started studying this back in 2004 What led me to study this was I noticed my own attention was becoming problematic. I found myself switching from project to project, and app to app, and web page to web page. I wondered if it was just me. I started talking to other people. Other people started mentioning similar kinds of things.
Being a researcher and a psychologist, I thought I can study this empirically and find out if it's just me. At the time, back in 2004, we used pretty primitive technology to measure this. We used stopwatch, so we would click the stopwatch every time a person shifted screens. It's very accurate, but it was very laborious and took a long time. But we were able to get objective results. Back then, we found attention was about two and a half minutes on any screen before people switch to another screen. At the time, it astounded me. But I kept measuring this and then computer logging techniques were invented, which made the process so much easier. They, again, could get very objective measures of how long people are on any computer or phone screen. Around 2011, we found attention spans to decline to about 75 seconds.

**Chris Williamson** (4:12)
What was that? The first one was two and a half minutes?

**Gloria Mark** (4:14)
Two and a half minutes down to about a minute and 15 seconds. This is on average. In the last five, six years, we find it's reached a steady state of about 47 seconds on any screen before switching.
This has also been replicated by others who found results within a few seconds. It seems to be that our attention spans have diminished. Let me present another way to look at this, which I think makes you see this perhaps more clearly. If you look at the median of our measurements, that means the midpoint. We find that half of all of our measurements show people's attention to be less than 40 seconds. Yes, of course, sometimes we spend longer, but half the time that we're on our devices, our attention spans are 40 seconds or less in duration.

**Chris Williamson** (5:20)