Why a digital detox won’t reset your attention span with Gloria Mark | ReThinking

1. 0:00 – 1:16

   Why your biggest distraction might be you: self-interruptions

   1. GMGloria Mark0:00

      People 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. [upbeat music]

   2. AGAdam Grant0:24

      I have to ask you just to kick us off, as an attention expert, do you do audits of your own attention?

   3. GMGloria Mark0:30

      Yes, I do. I mean, I, I practice this... It's more of an exercise that's actually built into my routine when I have this urge to read the news or, you know, check my phone or do something. So it's, I, I've learned to recognize those urges.

   4. AGAdam Grant0:49

      But for you, getting distracted is almost easier to justify because you can call it research.

   5. GMGloria Mark0:56

      [laughs] Yes, I can. Uh, I, I suppose I can, and then, and then I could pursue it and see what exactly is it that I'm being distracted by, what caused my distraction, what do I do about it? So yeah, I, I do tend to have this analytical perspective on my own distractions.

2. 1:16 – 2:03

   How attention fragmentation became a long-term concern (early 2000s)

   1. AGAdam Grant1:16

      When did you start to get worried that our attention was getting frayed or fragmented?

   2. GMGloria Mark1:22

      Well, this actually started a long time ago. You know, I came to the US from Germany around the year 2000. I was working at a research institute. It was a very different culture, and then all of a sudden I'm thrust into the world of American academia, and people were just frantic. You know, eh, being an assistant professor and having to deal with all these different projects. So I first noticed my own attention being really fragmented, and then I started talking to other people around this time, and everybody else was saying the same thing. So it, it actually started, you know, over 20 years ago.

3. 2:03 – 2:31

   Measuring attention in the workplace: screen switching as a proxy

   1. AGAdam Grant2:03

      And, uh, you did some of the pioneering work on actually measuring changes in our attention. How did you operationalize it?

   2. GMGloria Mark2:09

      Right. So because people who we studied were digital information workers, I thought it made the most sense as a proxy for where people were paying attention to look at when they changed the contents of their screen. So that was measurable. It's not a perfect measure, but it's, it's pretty darn close.

4. 2:31 – 3:10

   The shrinking window: from minutes to under a minute

   1. AGAdam Grant2:31

      And even your early findings were not encouraging.

   2. GMGloria Mark2:34

      No. [laughs] Uh, they, they were actually much worse than I expected. 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. And if we looked more broadly at any activity that people did, we found it to be about three minutes on average. So that included interacting with people, dealing with paper, and so, yeah, it was, it was much worse than I had imagined.

5. 3:10 – 6:10

   What changed in the digital environment: email → Slack → smartphones → social

   1. AGAdam Grant3:10

      And what were your early hunches about why?

   2. GMGloria Mark3:12

      My early hunches were that, um, the scope of work had expanded, that people were just being faced with too much work to do. And on the one hand, it was projects, but on the other hand, it was just the information that people had to deal with. And at the time, email was really starting to take off, so the means through which information could be exchanged were just increasing. It, it was a number of different things, yeah.

   3. AGAdam Grant3:42

      Ping.

   4. GMGloria Mark3:43

      [laughs] And that too.

   5. AGAdam Grant3:46

      So I think both information overload and just the number of channels that we can be interrupted on have only increased in the last two decades.

   6. GMGloria Mark3:54

      Yes.

   7. AGAdam Grant3:55

      What's happened to our attention as you've replicated this experiment over time?

   8. GMGloria Mark3:59

      Yeah, our attention spans have diminished, so they've, they've gotten shorter and shorter. So we, in 2012, we found the average length of time that people stayed with content on a screen was about 75 seconds. And then as we moved later and later, we found numbers like 47 seconds, 50 seconds, 44 seconds, and the, that averaged to about 47 seconds.

   9. AGAdam Grant4:28

      Wow. 47 seconds. I hope our listeners have now been listening for longer than that. What's going on there? Why, why does it seem to be getting worse?

   10. GMGloria Mark4:37

       Well, when you look back at all the changes that we've seen over, you know, since 2004, there are a lot of changes that happened in our digital environment. So let's start with email. Email just started taking off, and then we had additional ways to message. We had Slack. In my view, Slack [laughs] is a lot worse when it comes to causing our attention to be, uh, fragmented. And then the big one in 2007 was that the smartphone was launched, and so that became a, a big, uh, distractor for people, and people began not only switching content on the same screen, but switching between different forms of media. So there, it was like another dimension to switching attention. And yes, you know, e-commerce also took off, right? Online shopping and so many services now are on the web. Uh, news, right? News began to be updated continually. And so all these changes were, were going on.

   11. AGAdam Grant5:45

       You haven't even mentioned social media.

   12. GMGloria Mark5:47

       Well, there's that, [laughs] right? So yeah, Facebook, uh, came along in 2004, and then of course, you know, there, there was Twitter and Instagram and TikTok, and all of these, of course, were, were just huge distractors for people, and of course, not just on their computers, but also on their phones as well.

6. 6:10 – 7:55

   Distraction shows up in the body: stress, anger, and sadness

   1. AGAdam Grant6:10

      You know what, one of the things that's striking to me is that at some level, this goes deep. Like, it's not, it's not just that our attention might be hijacked, it's also, I think, visible in our bodies according to your work. Tell me about the research you did on email and, and how it affects us physiologically.

   2. GMGloria Mark6:30

      Well, we've, we've done a number of studies on email, and one study we did, we actually looked at, uh, thermal imaging in the face, and we found that when people turned to email, based on the thermal imaging results, that their sweat increased, which is a measure of stress. So people became stressed. But we've also looked at email use, uh, when people were wearing heart rate monitors, and heart rate monitors give a measure of what's called heart rate variability. It's the distance between heartbeats and the variability of that distance. And we found based on that, that people were stressed, and that, of course, was in real world, uh, environments. So, um, and we also did a study where... Th- this is not necessarily tied to just email, but it was a measure of interruptions in general. People were doing a task and were being interrupted with email. And we videotaped their faces. We used emotion recognition software on their faces, which is highly accurate in deciphering emotions. And we found when people were interrupted, they expressed significantly more anger and sadness on their face compared to when they weren't interrupted.

7. 7:55 – 10:26

   The paradox: we hate interruptions—but we keep making them

   1. AGAdam Grant7:55

      So i- it's, it's a little puzzling to me that on the one hand, we don't like being interrupted, on the other hand, we're constantly interrupting ourselves.

   2. GMGloria Mark8:04

      Yeah. So that was, um, probably one of the most surprising things that, that I found in the research. We looked at our data of external interruptions and internal interruptions over the course of the day, and these are from people in their real world environments. And what we found was that when external interruptions started to decrease, people started to increase the amount of self-interruption. And the way I interpret it is that people are just determined-

   3. AGAdam Grant8:39

      [laughs]

   4. GMGloria Mark8:39

      ... to [laughs] be interrupted, to have short attention spans, and if it's not coming from s- uh, something outside of them, then it comes from within themselves. And what does this look like? If, if you're observing someone, you see a person working intently, let's say on a Word document, and then suddenly they switch to check email or switch to look at their phone and there's no external trigger that you can see. So why do people do this? Well, we've interviewed people. We've asked them. It's, it's a variety of reasons. So number one, I would say it's habit. People are just habitually used to having short attention spans, and they maintain that through self-interruption. People also say they, uh, they remember something they forgot to do. So something cues them to, to look at something else. They have an urge, for example, to look up information, or some people just feel, "Well, it's a way to take a break."

   5. AGAdam Grant9:45

      Well, I love that you used the word determined because-

   6. GMGloria Mark9:47

      Yes

   7. AGAdam Grant9:48

      ... it speaks to, to something that I've been thinking and, and writing and talking about for a few years now, which is how much of a shortening attention span is a function of capacity as, as it's often talked about-

   8. GMGloria Mark10:00

      Yeah

   9. AGAdam Grant10:00

      ... versus motivation, as I tend to see it. And I think last year we had, uh, we had Daniel Immerwahr on the show. He wrote a New Yorker piece you're probably familiar with on-

   10. GMGloria Mark10:11

       Yeah

   11. AGAdam Grant10:11

       ... the attention crisis being potentially a distraction, and I think that in some ways this conversation builds on the chat that I had with Daniel. So we actually reached out to him and asked him to record a question for you, and-

   12. GMGloria Mark10:22

       Okay [laughs]

   13. AGAdam Grant10:22

       ... I'd love to play it for you so you can react.

   14. DIDaniel Immerwahr10:25

       [tape player clicks]

8. 10:26 – 16:30

   Short-form vs long-form media: obsession and distraction can coexist

   1. DIDaniel Immerwahr10:26

      So I wanna ask about this notion that we are more and more distracted. On the one hand, that seems intuitively and obviously true. Uh, we watch short videos on our phones. Our phones distract us from conversations. I teach college, and students genuinely struggle to read full books in a way that my generation didn't. But I see the other thing, too. I see people playing video games that just, you know, last more than 100 hours. Movies feel like they're longer than they've been. People binge-watch television shows sort of hours at a time. And one of the dominant media forms right now is the podcast, which, you know, some of the most popular podcasts just are conversations that can go on for hours. So I guess I see it as both an age of distraction and an age of obsession, both an age of the short form and the age of the long form, and I'm wondering how you put those two together when you talk about people's shortened attention spans.

   2. GMGloria Mark11:19

      [tape clicks] It's a great question. So first of all, let's keep in mind that, yes, films apparently have lengthened. But remember that, uh, film directors and editors are designing film to capture our attention, so they're doing what they can to keep people's eyes on that screen. So they, they know how to create tension. They know how to release tension. So I would argue that directors and editors are doing what they can from a design perspective to keep us, uh, involved. Now, we can look at films in a different way in terms of shot lengths, and shot lengths have decreased over the years. You know, when film and television first started out, shot lengths were quite long. For example, live TV, you would have a, a single shot length. And they've decreased in length. To roughly about every four seconds. And if you look at blockbuster films, they're about every two and a half seconds-

   3. AGAdam Grant12:24

      [whistles]

   4. GMGloria Mark12:24

      ... that they shift. So that's, that's designed to keep us excited and involved, and it also maps onto our short attention spans, where we're always looking for a change. So yeah, it's, it's an interesting, um, dichotomy here that in some ways things have gotten longer, but if you look at the other perspective, let's say students who have to read an article for a class or a book for a class. Yes, some books are, you know, beautifully written and they can immerse us and keep our, our attention, but, you know, let's face it, when I have assigned pretty dry scientific articles to students, they have a hard time paying attention. So it's not necessarily that the, the writing is designed to keep them involved. And of course, just look at people's everyday experience being on their computers and phones. They're just faced with an array of potential distractors. So it's very easy for us to distract ourselves or to get notifications and pings.

   5. AGAdam Grant13:40

      So putting your perspectives together, what I'm wondering is, do we have a higher threshold for what's worthy of our attention? So we were more tolerant of boredom before, or we were less dependent on k- a hook to keep our, our interest. And now, it, it might've been that we would've sat with a book for 5 or 10 minutes when we were bored.

   6. GMGloria Mark14:00

      I see.

   7. AGAdam Grant14:00

      Or we might have, we might have stayed with a movie for the first half hour to see if we liked it. And now if it's a dud in the first minute, I'm moving on because I have lots of other places that I can easily allocate my attention. One, do you buy that premise? Two, if, if that is the case, does that mean we actually need to lower the bar?

   8. GMGloria Mark14:18

      [laughs]

   9. AGAdam Grant14:19

      And, a- and, and get especially students and young people to stop expecting everything to be interesting.

   10. GMGloria Mark14:24

       Let's take, uh, social media, for example, right? There's this competition for our attention, and we see a lot of sensationalist content because people who post realize that the more sensational, the more extreme content is, the more likely they are to get people to pay attention to it. So in that sense, I guess we could say that we are habituated in a lot of ways to expect that, you know, things are going to attract our attention through extremeness or through change, and that's probably true in, in films, books, through, through novelty. We're expecting more novelty. So, uh, um, I think there might be, uh, something to that.

   11. AGAdam Grant15:12

       It seems that there are some movements cropping up that are trying to reset this a little bit. I think the, [laughs] for sure the weirdest one that I've seen was I've spent some time in Norway, and you've probably seen the slow TV movement there, where they actually televise a nine-hour train ride or a five-

   12. GMGloria Mark15:28

       [laughs]

   13. AGAdam Grant15:28

       ... day boat trip, and the entire thing is, is filmed and, and shown and people will sit and watch it. And I don't... I, I mean that's, that's a bridge too far for me, no pun intended. But I, I wonder, you know, is, is the, is the appeal of, of something like that, you know, people saying, "I just, like, I just wanna sit with and experience something continuous, something that's not a constant attention switch."

   14. GMGloria Mark15:54

       So it reminds me of Andy Warhol's films, right? He, I think he has a film about someone sleeping. But, uh, my, my response to that is, um, if you want to experience something more continuous, why, why watch a film about it? Go outside in nature, take a walk through, [laughs] through nature, or sit down with a book and, you know, experience the slowness of reading. So there are a lot of different ways that we can slow down other than watching a film about slowness.

9. 16:30 – 19:47

   Myth #1: ‘You should always be focused’—why breaks and task-switching can help

   1. AGAdam Grant16:30

      So I wanna, I wanna talk about what to do with our relationship with our devices, because I think from the work that you've done, it's pretty clear that [laughs] we, we, we have a hard time managing our devices and end up getting managed by them. And I think you pointed out that there are a few myths that, that make this worse, or that subscribing to a few myths makes it harder for us to, to have healthy relationships with our devices and manage our attention effectively. So I'd love to walk through the myths with you and, and just have you talk a little bit about, and riff a little bit about what do, what do we do if we reject them? As I understand it, the first myth is that when we're on a device, a computer primarily, I guess, we should always be focused and we should feel guilty if we're not.

   2. GMGloria Mark17:13

      Yeah.

   3. AGAdam Grant17:14

      You don't agree.

   4. GMGloria Mark17:14

      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? We, we can retain the, the things we're looking at. We can process things more deeply. So, you know, the idea of focusing straight through is that's just not how humans are, are wired.

   5. AGAdam Grant17:54

      I think this reframes how I think about my own writing routine. You know, my, I think my ideal writing day is one where I start writing the moment that our kids leave for school and I stop the minute they get home. You know, for a long time Uh, you know, I, I thought about that as, okay, I'm, you know, I'm really laser focused on deep work, but when I actually pay attention to what I do as a writer, I take constant breaks, only the breaks are just different tasks that are part of the writing process.

   6. GMGloria Mark18:21

      Yeah.

   7. AGAdam Grant18:21

      So I don't just sit and write continuously for eight hours. I will write a paragraph or two, and then I realize there's a hole that needs some research, and I'll go and read a bunch of journal articles, and then I toggle back to the document and I, you know, write up a summary of what I found. And then I'll realize that I'm missing a good story, and I'll go searching for stories. And so, like, all of these, you know, sub-tasks are feeding into the goal of writing an article or writing a chapter, but they don't require [laughs] sustained attention on one thing for hours at a time.

   8. GMGloria Mark18:52

      Yeah.

   9. AGAdam Grant18:52

      And I don't feel bad about that. I feel that that's productive. Is that essentially where you're trying to encourage more of us to go?

   10. GMGloria Mark18:57

       Yeah. I, I think your, uh, approach makes perfect sense. That's the way I write as well. But let me also add that, uh, it's important to sense when you're starting to feel fatigued. And when you're feeling fatigued, then it's time to step back, take a break, replenish. But yes, you know, moving to different kinds of tasks is, is just a great way to, you know, keep our, our minds active and keep thinking of new ideas. For myself, when I'm writing, I, I often get stuck, right? I d- I don't know where to go next, and that's when I turn and I start reading. And I'll read, um, articles because that's, that helps give me a new perspective and new ideas. So it's really important to, to switch around like that.

10. 19:47 – 21:51

    Sequencing attention: big mind vs little mind, and the role of boredom

    1. AGAdam Grant19:47

       I've come to think also that sequencing is important. So Jihae Shin and I published a paper a number of years ago on how if you're doing a highly interesting task, if you follow that with a, a fairly boring task, your performance on the boring task will suffer because the contrast between the, [laughs] the work you loved and now the mind-numbing misery that you're experiencing is too great. And so I've [laughs] I've tried to, I've tried to treat interesting tasks as a reward for get- kind of powering through my most boring tasks or taper a little bit and say, okay, in between, you know, the exciting and the boring but important is gonna be a moderately interesting task so that the contrast isn't quite so vi- severe. I'm curious about whether you have other recommendations on sequencing to maintain attention.

    2. GMGloria Mark20:32

       Yeah. So we've, we've found in our research that people have different kinds of attention, and let me explain what I mean by that. There are some activities that people do where they're just highly engaged and challenged, and that might be reading a difficult article or writing. But a lot of things we do, we're really engaged, but we're not challenged at all. So that could be stepping back and doing a, a silly mind game or doing solitaire. The writer Maya Angelou talked about her big mind and her little mind, and her big mind was what she used for her deep creative work. Her little mind was she would step back and do crossword puzzles or play solitaire. So she also did this kind of sequencing where s- she switched between her deep focused work and work where she was engaged but not challenged. That kind of helped her, her mind settle down and replenish. And sometimes it makes sense to be bored, let ourselves be bored, like you mentioned. Um, and we define boredom as not being challenged and not being engaged, and that's not such a bad idea at times.

11. 21:51 – 28:12

    Myth #2: Flow as the ideal—why ‘depth of processing’ matters more for knowledge work

    1. AGAdam Grant21:51

       Okay, this goes right to your second myth, which has to do with flow. I have to say, this was a big rethinking moment for me when I was reading your book because I guess I've been reading about flow for 25 years. It's shown up in some of my research. Uh, I've always thought about it as the optimal state of engagement, just as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi first described it when he coined the term. And you really pushed me to think again because you question whether, in fact, flow is the ideal state when we're using technology. Walk me through why.

    2. GMGloria Mark22:21

       Yeah. So first of all, um, the, the task has a lot to do with it. When we think about flow, it's really an ideal combination of being challenged and using your skill, and you get into the state where, um, you're so immersed that time just doesn't seem to matter. Before I studied psychology, I was an artist, and I would readily get into flow. I, I would be working in my studio, and before I knew it, many hours had gone by. It was the middle of the night. You know, where, where did the time go? I was in flow, and that's why I, I didn't realize what was going on. So I actually started out assuming that people, when they do knowledge work on their devices, would also get into a state of flow. But in interviewing people, I found that it rarely happens, and [laughs] uh, and I attribute it to the kind of work that we typically do. Now, a coder can get into the, into flow because it's the nature of their task. If a person is composing music, they can get into flow, and sometimes writing-

    3. AGAdam Grant23:29

       Mm

    4. GMGloria Mark23:29

       ... on your computer you can get into flow. But for the typical kind of work that knowledge workers do, a lot of it is doing analytical thinking, decision-making. So it's It's a very different kind of process than the kind of thinking that, that can, um, lead to a flow state.

    5. AGAdam Grant23:50

       Something has always puzzled me, though, about flow, which is Mihaly was very clear in his original theory that challenge is important, but he presented data suggesting that most of us find flow when driving on the freeway regularly, which is not a, a challenging task most of the time that you're doing it. I've also-- I've read, I think, about Ryan Quinn's research, for example, on flow in conversation, that a lot of people find flow talking about issues that, you know, might be interesting to them, but the conversation isn't necessarily intellectually taxing. It's not demanding. It's not challenging in the traditional sense. [chuckles] That has led me to wonder, is challenge actually necessary for flow?

    6. GMGloria Mark24:27

       Hmm. Well, I guess the other way to think about it is are, are these activities you're talking about really flow or are they something else? So if you're driving, a lot of that is just automatic processing, right? And I'm not sure we can call that really flow. And that's why you can drive and have a conversation with a passenger because you're not using your, uh, cognitive resources to pay attention to the road. But as soon as a car cuts you off, you stop talking with, uh, the passenger 'cause you have to allocate resources to figure out how to not crash into that car. And, you know, with a conversation, I would say is that flow if you're just, you know, having fun with someone, you're having a really simple conversation? It could be, but I, I've also talked with people who describe flow in conversations, for example, during brainstorming, where they're really... They're needing to think and tax those, their mind's muscles, and then they'll hear another idea that they get really excited about. And to me, that's, that's a better, uh, representation of flow in a conversation.

    7. AGAdam Grant25:42

       Why? Is it because the absorption is deeper?

    8. GMGloria Mark25:45

       I mean, it's hard to know if the absorption is deeper, but I would say that people are exercising their minds a little bit more. They're, they're thinking a little more deeply. And so in a sense, they're challenging themselves a little bit more than, you know... I mean, of course, having a simple conversation with someone is, it's a lot of fun. I'm not exactly sure that I would call that flow according to what Csikszentmihalyi defined as flow.

    9. AGAdam Grant26:14

       Fair. Yeah, I think there's a, there's an element of goal orientation, that the-

    10. GMGloria Mark26:18

        Yes

    11. AGAdam Grant26:18

        ... the task has a purpose-

    12. GMGloria Mark26:20

        Yeah

    13. AGAdam Grant26:20

        ... as opposed to it's just fun. Let's go back to knowledge work then. I find your argument persuasive that the structure of most knowledge jobs is not conducive to flow. You may have tasks that are, but-

    14. GMGloria Mark26:33

        Mm-hmm

    15. AGAdam Grant26:33

        ... your overall, [chuckles] like, your overall role will not necessarily put you in flow four or five hours a day. So what is the ideal attentional state if it's not flow?

    16. GMGloria Mark26:42

        [chuckles] I would say the ideal attentional state is depth of processing, which, um, c- could be a precursor to flow, could get you into flow or not, but it's being able to deeply think about something. You know, again, it could lead to some great idea or it could just, it could lead to solving a, a mathematical equation, but it, it does, it does lead to something. But as a result of thinking more deeply, we also tend to retain information better, so we connect whatever that thing is we're reasoning deeply about to our own store of knowledge and expanding it, and I think that's really what's important.

    17. AGAdam Grant27:30

        It's interesting to me that you said thinking more deeply and not also more broadly.

    18. GMGloria Mark27:35

        Also more broadly. I, I, I don't want to exclude that. It's also very important to do, uh, divergent thinking, where we think of lots of different ideas. In fact, as you know, thinking has both a divergent component and a convergent component. Both of those are, are really important.

    19. AGAdam Grant27:56

        So it seems like, though, from, you know, from what we've covered, [chuckles] we're, we're not struggling from an attentional breadth perspective as much as we are from a depth perspective. We're, we're getting lots of broad stimuli into our-

    20. GMGloria Mark28:08

        I-

    21. AGAdam Grant28:08

        [chuckles] ... right, into our days.

    22. GMGloria Mark28:10

        Yeah, I, I would, I would agree with that.

12. 28:12 – 31:46

    Practical starting points: audit your day, find attentional peaks, protect them

    1. AGAdam Grant28:12

       So if the goal is then to improve our capacity for depth or, you know, build the habit of going deeper and maybe focusing longer, where do we start?

    2. GMGloria Mark28:22

       Well, I have been doing a lot of interviews with people where I ask them to walk me through a day and how does technology fit into your day? And I think that's a, that's a really good place to start because people can become aware, like, "Oh, the first thing I do in the morning is reach for my phone [chuckles] before I even look out the window and I, I don't even get natural sunlight." And then they can start to realize, uh, what's going on. "Oh, and I carry my phone with me into the bathroom and then I'm sitting at the breakfast table in front of a screen, and then throughout the day I'm checking social media." So it's really important to do a kind of self-examination, how you're using technology and is that working for you? Is that the best way to be using it? Is it getting you stressed?

    3. AGAdam Grant29:11

       One of the things I've discovered when doing that is there's a surprising power of understanding your own chronotype. I know you know a lot about this. My, my simple aha from digging into the research and also just watching my own patterns was that I was much more focused in the morning than the afternoon. And not surprisingly, [chuckles] I turn out to be a morning person, not a night owl. And so what I tried to do then was shift a lot of my creative and analytical work to the mornings and then say, "Okay, I'm gonna take meetings in the afternoons and, you know, I'll catch up on emails at night." And that cadence has worked pretty well. Seems like it's much harder for somebody who's a night owl to be able to cater to their chronotype and I, I [chuckles] wonder if you have any thoughts on that. Is that just protecting late afternoons?

    4. GMGloria Mark29:56

       We've actually done research on this and we used an experience sampling approach which is the very same method that Csikszentmihalyi used where we asked people, you know, at the moment you receive this electronic probe- How challenged were you and how engaged were you? And we interrupted people a lot throughout the day, and the irony does not escape me [laughs]

    5. AGAdam Grant30:19

       [laughs]

    6. GMGloria Mark30:20

       That we were interrupting people. But we found that, uh, people's focused attention, which I define as being both challenged and engaged, has certain patterns that show peaks and valleys throughout the day. So we, we see these rhythms. And of course, there are individual differences, like they are, there are with most things in psychology. People who are early types in their chronotype, their attentional peaks are much earlier in the day. People who are late types, of course, their peaks are, are much later in the day. We actually find two peaks. There's a peak in the morning, and then there's a valley around lunchtime. There's another peak, uh, in mid-afternoon. And so I always argue that first of all, discover when your attentional peak is. It's easy. It's not hard. You can do journaling and figure it out. And arrange to do those tasks that require the most work and the most creativity at those times when your attention is at its peak, and don't squander that time by, by doing email or reading the news-

    7. AGAdam Grant31:32

       [laughs]

    8. GMGloria Mark31:32

       ... or looking at social media. But that's, that's how we can be productive, is to find that best moment for you when your attention is in full capacity and, and use it wisely.

13. 31:46 – 34:47

    Why digital detox won’t reset attention: sustainable routine changes and mind-wandering

    1. AGAdam Grant31:46

       Well, okay, so this goes to the, the popular idea of the digital detox. I think the, the most interesting paper I've read on this in the last few years is one I'm sure you've come across. It was an experiment by Julia Brailovskaya and colleagues where they, they compare digital abstinence with, um, digital moderation effectively. And I think the gist of the experiment, for our listeners who aren't familiar, is one group of hundreds of people is randomly assigned to take a, a seven-day total refrain from social media and smartphone use, uh, and just cut off cold turkey. Then there's another group that's just asked to decrease their smartphone use by one hour a day. And four months later, the moderation group is happier, less depressed, less anxious, and even leads a healthier lifestyle. They're less likely to smoke, for example, than the abstinence group. And so I came away from that thinking, "Okay, maybe we don't need to cut off cold turkey. Maybe, maybe that just requires too much willpower for people, and then they just revert back to their old habits after the detox. Maybe smaller changes are more sustainable, and that's where we should be focusing." What do you think? You're the expert.

    2. GMGloria Mark32:54

       [laughs] I am not a fan of digital detox because to me, it's like a crash diet. So what I think is a lot more effective, and what this experiment demonstrates, is for people to change their routines. They change their practice in life. And so by cutting down social media or the smartphone use an hour each day, it's rewiring their routines, and that's, that's more permanent, right? It's just so much more effective and important for people to change the way that they're using technology to be able to integrate it into their lives in a way that's long-lasting. So it's not a quick fix like a digital detox, but it's really they're, they're thinking, uh, in the long term.

    3. AGAdam Grant33:50

       I love that. Okay, so when it comes to rewiring our routines, you are not completely opposed to daydreaming, and I was a little surprised by that because it seems like the opposite of the deep focused attention that we've been talking about. So tell me why that should be part of our routine and what it looks like.

    4. GMGloria Mark34:08

       Well, sometimes people can get their greatest ideas from mind wandering. There's also the psychological idea that if you let a problem incubate, like you really are faced with a tough problem, and then you just kind of step away, you let your mind move on to something else, and then you come back to it, you see it with fresh eyes. It is known in neuroscience that our mind, even if we're not focused on something, it's still working. We're still having thoughts, and it might even be working on that problem that we may, may not be consciously thinking of. So mind wandering can actually have benefits for us.

14. 34:47 – 39:04

    Lightning round + AI concern: losing ‘constructive effort’ and mental capabilities

    1. AGAdam Grant34:47

       I think that's persuasive. Okay, let us go to a lightning round. First one is, what do you think is the best advice you can offer that we haven't covered yet?

    2. GMGloria Mark34:56

       Paying attention to those things in life that can bring us deeper happiness and well-being.

    3. AGAdam Grant35:04

       What is something you've rethought or changed your mind about recently?

    4. GMGloria Mark35:07

       So, uh, this isn't so recent, but when I wrote the book, I talked about rote activity as having benefits for us. And it, there are some benefits. It makes us happy. But we can go too far with it. We can go down a rabbit hole with, uh, doing some activity that's mindless and makes us happy. So I would like to restate what I'm saying and really do it in moderation.

    5. AGAdam Grant35:34

       Do you have a guideline for how long mindless activity should last before we reengage our conscious attention?

    6. GMGloria Mark35:41

       I don't have a set time, but by no means should it interfere with your, your work, other individuals, or your life. And if it starts doing that, then stop it.

    7. AGAdam Grant35:53

       Great. Okay, over to you. Office hours time. Do you have a puzzle, a problem, a question for me?

    8. GMGloria Mark36:00

       I, I do. What I'm seeing is that people are stopping putting in effort where it matters, what I call constructive effort. As a result, they're- losing capabilities. And, um, what worries me is about AI, that, um, people can all too easily defer mental capabilities to AI. So what can we do? How can we get people to learn to recognize that putting in effort can benefit them?

    9. AGAdam Grant36:34

       Such an important question. I think I have two thoughts on this. The first one is I've been reading a bunch of research suggesting that the easiest way to motivate effort is not pleasure, it's purpose. Because often, like, the act of, of putting effort into a task is a little unpleasant. And so, like, trying to add joy is not that easy. But reminding people that, you know, there's, there's something of value at stake, you know, I think is, is effective in a lot of ways. I think the other, the other thing I would say on this is, yeah, I started thinking about Robert Eisenberger's theory of learned industriousness. And the basic aha from Eisenberger was that when we reward effort repeatedly, effort itself starts to take on secondary reward properties. It's like a form of classical conditioning. I know I, I've experienced that running on the treadmill, for example. I don't like running, and yet what I've tried to do is, number one, give myself a, a favorite task or treat afterward when I hit my running goal, and number two, pair it with a favorite TV show that I'm only allowed to watch when I'm on the treadmill. And over time, I don't want to say I look, I've started to look forward to running, but it's less aversive, and I find myself sticking with the habit more. And I think there's something there. It reminds me a little bit of, of Katy Milkman's work on temptation bundling, where, you know, she would, she would lock a favorite audiobook, um, or movie at the gym, and then you had to go to get the reward. And I don't think that should be the ongoing way that we motivate, but I think initially, right, if, if that act of effort is, you know, is really taxing, um, to associate it with something more positive, um, maybe shifts our view of it a little bit. I don't know. What do you think?

    10. GMGloria Mark38:15

        What I'm wondering about is, you know, we're, we've entered this era of AI, and the purpose is that people want to get a document written, or they want a summary of a document. So the purpose for them is really clear. And I, I think they're losing sight of the purpose of, of learning or the work of, um, you know, using their mind, using their working memory to expand. So I, I, I think that the, the purpose is somehow getting lost.

    11. AGAdam Grant38:48

        Gloria, it's been such a pleasure to have you on. Thank you for coming to ReThinking.

    12. GMGloria Mark38:52

        Thank you so much for inviting me. [upbeat music]

Episode duration: 39:14