Re:Thinking with Adam GrantWhy a digital detox won’t reset your attention span with Gloria Mark | ReThinking
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Why attention fragments, why detox fails, and how to rebuild focus
- Mark’s long-running studies use screen-content switching as a proxy for attention and show average on-screen focus dropping from about 2.5 minutes in 2003 to roughly 47 seconds in later replications.
- Interruptions are not only external (pings and notifications); when external interruptions fall, people often compensate by increasing self-interruptions driven by habit, urges, and “break” seeking.
- Digital tools and platforms (email, Slack, smartphones, continuously updated news, and social media) intensify switching and are linked to measurable physiological stress responses and negative emotions during interruptions.
- The conversation challenges myths that constant focus and tech-enabled “flow” are the ideal goals, arguing instead for breaks, task-switching that replenishes, and prioritizing depth of processing.
- Evidence and experience suggest digital detoxes resemble crash diets—moderation and routine redesign (aligned with attentional peaks/chronotype) create longer-lasting improvements in attention and well-being.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasAttention fragmentation is measurable and has worsened sharply.
Mark tracked how long knowledge workers stay on a single on-screen activity before switching, finding a decline from ~2.5 minutes (2003) to ~47 seconds in later years, indicating a major shift in work rhythms and cognition.
You are often the interrupter—not just your devices.
When external interruptions decrease, self-interruptions rise, suggesting habits and internal urges (checking, looking things up, “taking a break”) sustain short attention cycles even without notifications.
Email and interruption-heavy work carries a real stress load.
Thermal imaging, heart-rate variability, and facial-emotion analysis link turning to email/interruptions with increased stress markers and more anger/sadness expressions, reframing “just checking messages” as physiologically costly.
The goal isn’t nonstop focus; it’s strategic replenishment.
The “always focus” narrative is a myth—breaks and switching among supportive subtasks (like research or reading during writing) can maintain energy, reduce fatigue, and improve depth when you return.
Flow is rare in typical knowledge work; aim for depth of processing.
Because much knowledge work involves decision-making and analytical thought rather than immersive skill-challenge matching, Mark argues that deeply processing and retaining information is a more realistic and valuable target than chasing flow.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesPeople have always talked about interruptions as coming from some external source from outside of us. We hear the ping on our phone or we get a notification, but it turns out that people are about as likely to self-interrupt, to be interrupted by themselves of their own volition.
— Gloria Mark
Back in 2003, when we started measuring this, I thought people might spend five minutes at a time, but it turns out they spent about two and a half minutes on any content on screen before switching.
— Gloria Mark
Yeah, our attention spans have diminished, so they've, they've gotten shorter and shorter.
— Gloria Mark
I am not a fan of digital detox because to me, it's like a crash diet.
— Gloria Mark
So there seems to be this public narrative that we should focus as long as possible and that's how we'll be productive. But that's not how our minds are built, right? We need to be able to pull back, replenish, take breaks, refresh our mind's limited, uh, resources, and then we can go back and we can focus a lot more effectively, right?
— Gloria Mark
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
