How To Regain Control Of Your Attention - Dr Gloria Mark

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.

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.

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

Given that you've been studying it for quite a while, have you looked at any longitudinal stuff to do with this, if we had degradation over time? Is it worse now than it was 20 years ago?

Yes. As a matter of fact, I, I have. So I, I first started studying this back in 2004, and what led me to study this was I noticed my own attention was becoming problematic, and I found myself switching from project to project and, you know, app to app and web page to web page, and I wondered if it was just me, and I started talking to other people. Other people started mentioning similar kinds of things. So, you know, being a researcher and a psychologist, I thought, "I can study this empirically and find out if it's just me." Uh, so at the time, back in 2004, we used pretty primitive technology to measure this. We, we used stopwatches. So we would click the stopwatch every time a person shifted screens. Um, and it ... You know, it's very accurate, but it was very laborious, and, uh, you know, it took a long time, but we were able to get objective results, and back then, we found attention was about two and a half minutes on any screen before people switched 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-

What was that, the first one was two and a half minutes?

Two and a half minutes, down to about a minute and 15 seconds. Uh, and this is on, on average in, in the last five, six years, we find, uh, it's about ... It's reached a steady state of about 47 seconds on any screen before switching. Um, i- i- this has also been replicated by others, who found results within a few seconds. So it, it seems to be that our attention spans have diminished, and, and let me present another way to look at this, which I think is, um, you know, makes, makes you see this perhaps more clearly. If you look at the median of our measurements, that means the midpoint, the midpoint, we find that half of all of our measurements show people's attention to be less than 40 seconds. So, you know, yes, of course, sometimes we spend longer, but half the time that we're on our devices, our attention spans are 40 seconds or l- less in duration.