Good Life Project - How to Regain Focus & Attention | Gloria Mark, PhD

Episode Date: May 4, 2023

We want to hear from YOU! Take our survey.Could Your Smartphone Be Destroying Your Focus? Have our attention spans, will power, mood and productivity just become hopelessly derailed for life? Answer is, it depends. What we do about our rapidly-diminishing attention and its effect on our work, lives, health, and relationships is mission-critical. In today's world, we're constantly bombarded by digital distractions. From emails and social media notifications to the constant buzzing of our smartphones, our attention spans are dwindling to an average of 46 seconds on a screen, before our attention flitters off to something or someone else. But what if the key to regaining control over your focus lies not only in your own habits but also in the way you interact with your devices? Our guest today is Gloria Mark whose new book, Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity reveals surprising results from her decades of research into how technology affects our attention and how we can take control, not only to find more success in our careers, but also to find health and wellness in our everyday lives.In this intriguing conversation, you'll discover:The alarming effect of digital multitasking on our ability to focus and the implications for our mental health.The power of mindfulness practices in helping to combat digital distractions and build a stronger attention muscle.How the "future self" concept can be utilized to motivate ourselves to stay on task and resist the temptation of digital distractions.Simple yet effective environmental changes, such as turning off notifications, can make a significant difference in our ability to concentrate.The importance of deep, meaningful connections with others in living a fulfilling and creative life.You can find Gloria at: Website | LinkedInIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Johann Hari on how to reclaim focus.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKED. To submit your “moment & question” for consideration to be on the show go to sparketype.com/submit. Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We live in a digital world. A lot of people propose doing digital detoxes. And I would say, sure, it works for a while, but it's just like a crash diet. You can cut off technology for a while, but then you come back and have the same habits. And so rather than thinking about how we should be separating from technology,

let's think about how we can better integrate technology into our lives. And most certainly we're overusing technology. We're using technology in the wrong way. So what's better is for us to live with technology, but learn how we can gain agency over our attention when we use it. Okay, so question for you, could your smartphone, that device that you love that seems to reside in whatever pocket seems to be closest to you at any given time, could that very thing be destroying your focus? Have our attention spans, our willpower, our mood and productivity just become hopelessly derailed for life in no small part due to our relationship with technology? And the answer is, well, it depends. What we do about our

rapidly diminishing attention and its effect on our work, our lives, our health and relationships at this moment in time is mission critical. In today's world, we are constantly bombarded with digital distractions, from emails and social media notifications to the constant buzzing of our smartphones. Our attention spans are dwindling to an average of 46 seconds on a screen before our attention flitters off to something or someone else. But what if the key to regaining control over your focus lies not only in your own habits, your own choices and awareness, but also in the way that you choose to interact with your devices. Well, our guest today is

Gloria Mark, whose new book, Attention Span, a groundbreaking way to restore balance, happiness, and productivity. It reveals some pretty surprising results from her decades of research into how technology affects our attention and how we can take control, not only to find more success in our careers, but also more health and wellness in our everyday lives. Gloria is the Chancellor's Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research. And with a PhD in psychology from Columbia University, she studies the impact of digital media on people's lives, including attention spans, multitasking, distraction,

mood, and behavior when using computers and smartphones. And her work has been featured all over from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Atlantic, BBC, and so many other places. And in today's conversation, you will discover the alarming effect of digital multitasking on our ability to focus and the implications for our mental health, the power of mindfulness practice, and helping to combat digital distraction and build a stronger attention muscle. We talk about how the quote future self concept can be utilized to motivate ourselves to stay on task and resist the temptation of digital distraction. We explore simple yet effective environmental changes, such as turning off

notifications, but maybe in a different way than you thought about, that can make a significant difference in our ability to concentrate and the importance of deep, meaningful connection with others in living a fulfilling and creative life and offsetting the taunt of digital distraction and attention drain. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations,

iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The topic of attention, I think, is on everybody's mind for a lot of different reasons and a lot of different ways. There's been a lot of conversation around it in recent years. You lead with a stat in speaking on your website, in the book, which is around some research that you've done,

which is that it's kind of a mind boggling stat that the average person spends just 47 seconds on any screen before shifting their attention. Tell me more about this. Let me start by saying that I've been tracking attention spans for a long time. And I started tracking them back in around 2004. This is before we had sophisticated computer logging techniques, and we would follow people around with stopwatches. My goal was to get objective measures of attention spans, as opposed to having people simply self-report and say, oh, I think my attention span is this. We wanted to get really solid measures. We started by using these stopwatches, which, as you can imagine, is very labor-intensive.

But then we switched to computer logging techniques., over the last five, six years, we find that attention spans average about 47 seconds on any screen. This has been replicated by other people as well. One person found 50 seconds on average, another person found 44 seconds on average. I've also done multiple studies where I get very close to this 47 mark. And taking all these studies together, average is 47 seconds. So it's really short. And if we look at the midpoint of our observations, midpoint means median. Maybe some people are familiar with that term. That's 40 seconds. And that means that half of all of our observations that we find are 40 seconds or less. So we have this finding that people's attention is very dynamic. They're shifting screens,

whether it's on their computer or phone. And I call this kind of behavior kinetic, kinetic referring to being very dynamic, as opposed to having long, sustained focus. Yeah, that's a very kind label for that quality of attention. There are a lot of other words that I think we probably can think about. I'm curious, if the top of the bell curve there is 47 seconds, if you go actually to a couple of deviations out on either side from that, sort of like the extreme ends of the spectrum where there are very few people, what are you seeing in terms of those numbers, both on the super short side and the super long side? Oh, wow. I'd actually have to go back to the data to actually check that out. I don't have that off the top of my head. I mean, maybe this statistic would be a little bit helpful.

We looked at the number of times that people check email during the day, and that average is about 77 times a day. And if we looked at the extremes of that measure, we found one person checked it something like 356 times a day. So we do have extreme individuals that we find in our data. Yeah. I mean, that's incredible. And I want to dive a lot more into sort of the role that technology plays in a lot of this, but before we get there, let's sort of do a little bit of defining because we're using this word attention already. What are we actually talking about when we're talking about attention? When people think of attention, they think of it as residing in a single place in the brain. And it's actually more like a series of networks in the same way that if we talk about

the financial system, there's no single entity that defines the financial system, but it's rather, it's a network of banks and credit unions and insurance companies and so on. And it's the same way with our attention. So we have one network that's responsible for vigilance, for holding sustained attention. We have another network that's responsible for selecting what to focus on, deciding what you want to orient your attention to. Then there's a third network, which you can think of it as the offensive linemen of our brain that kind of guards against peripheral information, guards against distractions, right? That's called executive control. So we have these different

networks that work together and help us decide where to focus, how long we want to focus, and prevent us from being distracted. It's interesting also, and the way you're describing it, it's almost like some parts serve a gatekeeper role, some parts serve a super attentiveness role, some is more of like a selection role. I've heard, and I think so many of us have heard some variation of, you know, we have millions of bits of stimuli coming at us on any given day. But in order for us to function as human beings, our brains need to in some way, shape or form

be able to tune out probably a significant amount of those and really take in only the things that are in some way significant to us. Is this a function of that sort of like a attentional circuitry as well? Yes. And let me also mention that a lot of times it's very hard for us to filter out this kind of peripheral information because our attention can be automatic and we can respond to certain kinds of signals in the environment, things that are flashing, things that are moving. We tend to respond to those and we can't help but respond to them. It's like if you're driving and all of a sudden the traffic light turns yellow, right? We suddenly slam on our brakes or we should actually.

And that's an automatic reaction. And if we look back from an evolutionary perspective, people who were hunters and gatherers had to always be on alert for signals in the environment that could be dangerous, like predators. And so they're always scanning the environment. Something that moved, caught their eye, is what they responded to. And so when we're on our devices, we're constantly faced with all kinds of flashing, blinking things on our screens that can distract us, but we can also be distracted from things within ourselves. I mean, it's interesting also the way that you're describing

it, because I think a lot of us have this connection between the word attention and quote, what we see. And there seems to be also a more complicated relationship between that. I'm thinking of this meme that was floating around the internet years ago that was actually based on some research where you were prompted to say there were people in gorilla outfits moving around, passing a basketball between each other, and you say, how many times was it? Or no, it was human beings passing it between each other. How many times was the ball passed? And at the end of it, they would ask, did you see the gorilla? And there was somebody who walked through the middle of the screen in a gorilla outfit. And a large percentage of people, including me, who feel like I'm pretty good at seeing

things, I'm pretty attentive, had absolutely no idea that a person in a gorilla outfit walked across the screen. So I'm fascinated by the notion of the relationship between what our eyes take in. Is there an attentional element of that, that because you were told to focus your attention on a particular thing that you actually don't see things outside of that? Yeah. So this phenomenon that you're talking about is called change blindness, that we can be so focused on something that we can miss something that's quite important. You can think of our attention like a flashlight. And you can take a flashlight beam, and you can focus that beam

very narrowly on something. Let's say you're reading something, and that beam is focused there. But then we miss what's going on in the periphery. Or the flashlight beam could be very wide and diffuse, and we take in all kinds of information in the environment, but we're not necessarily focusing on any particular thing. So the goal for people is to be able to control that flashlight beam. There's some cases where we want that beam to be laser focused. There's other times where we want that beam to be very wide and diffuse. For example, let's say we want to think of some new idea, then we want to have this very diffuse range of our attention so that we can be open to letting

new ideas come into our minds. Because on really laser focus like that, we don't give ourselves the opportunity to do it. So we have to be able to control that flashlight beam of our attention so that it works for us. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. And I would imagine things like threat play into if you're in an environment where you've got to be, where something in you says for me to be safe, I need to be constantly scanning and have a broad horizon that's going to control like the widening of that beam. And then if you're focusing laser focused on a craft or something like this, and it's very meticulous.

I've used the word focus and you've used the word focus a number of times now. You also describe, you sort of break down attention to different states and qualities, only one of them being focus. And I thought that was fascinating because I think most of us think about attention as focus, but you're actually saying that there are actually different states or qualities of attention that maybe we even dismiss or minimalize that actually play a really important role. Yeah, that's exactly right. So most people tend to think of there being two states of attention, being focused or unfocused. And when I first started studying this, I realized that sometimes we can

be very engaged with something and it requires a lot of mental effort. So we can be very challenged. If I'm reading something difficult, reading tax law, which is not a favorite thing of mine, but something I've had to do. It really involves a lot of challenge for me. There's other things we do where we can be very engaged and not at all challenged, like when we're playing solitaire or you're playing some computer game or you're doing some simple activity outside. We call that rote attention, right? You're very engaged, but you're not at all challenged in what you're doing. It's easy. What you're doing is very

easy. If you're not engaged and not challenged, we call that boredom. It's a state of boredom. And if you're challenged but not engaged, we call that frustration. An example is when I have a tech problem, right? It's very challenging for me and I'm just not engaged. It's hard for me to stay engaged with trying to fix that. So people switch among all these different types of attention throughout the day. And it turns out that the focused attention, when you're engaged and challenged, it tends to have a rhythm throughout the day.

We find there to be two peaks, mid to late morning, and then there's another peak mid to late afternoon. And what we did was we probed people on their computers and phones throughout the day. And we just asked them two very simple questions. How engaged were you in the thing you were just doing and how challenged were you? And so we were able to get a range of these kinds of responses throughout the day across lots of people for multiple days. And we could map it out onto these different types of attention that I talked about. And we find there to be these peaks of focus time, the morning and afternoon. And it corresponds to the ebb and flow of the limited attentional resources that we have.

You know, other times people switch and they do rote activity using rote attention. Sometimes they're bored. So we're sort of regularly flipping between these different modes, but it seems like your research is showing that there are these two fairly universal moments throughout the day when we're able to access more of a peak focus state. So what popped into my mind as you're describing it, because it seems like the four different states are really, it's a factor of engagement and challenge. The question that popped into my mind as you're describing that is do stakes play a role in this as well? And maybe are they just a factor of one or the other? So here would be the example that I got curious about. If I am outside rock

climbing, okay, so I'm going to be super engaged because I have to be. And it's going to be really challenging, both cognitively, creatively, and physically. And the stakes may be life and death. Now, I could also be at home playing a hyper-vivid, realistic video game that has me climbing on that identical peak, right? So really engaged, really challenging, cognitively complex, not physically, but the actual stakes to me are really low. And I'm wondering if you have a sense whether that would change the attentional quality between those two things. That's right. Stakes are really important. And what stakes can do is change our levels of arousal. And when our arousal is higher, we generally tend to pay more attention to something.

So if you're in a life or death situation of rock climbing, probably a pretty high arousal, right? And you want to be really attentive to what you're doing because one false move, that's not going to be a good thing for you. We want to be careful because when arousal gets too high, arousal is a form of stress, but when it gets too high, then our performance actually drops. And so you want to make sure that you stay at that sweet spot of arousal. It's also called stress so that you're just challenged enough so that you can be engaged. You can perform at your peak, but not too much arousal because then you're just overwhelmed and you won't be able to perform as well. This is a relationship in psychology called the Yerkes-Dodson law.

I mean, that's really interesting. I would imagine also, and tell me if this is even remotely right, that if you add stress or higher stakes to it, and there's almost like a hyper-attentiveness, a hyper-visualness to it, does that actually require your brain? Will it consume more energy than a root state or a boredom state or a frustration state, or even a lower level focus state? And the literal depletion of energy substrates in your brain play a role in your ability to sustain that. Yeah, it does require less energy. There's less mental effort. There's less challenge.

And if you think about it in terms of this notion of us having a limited amount of attentional resources, it's using less attentional resources. If it's less challenging, if you're doing something that's more challenging, it's using up more our precious attentional resources. Got it. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. So the way you described the focus state, it seems like that's the state that most of us talk about when we talk about attention. We have these other three states, though. I've always been taught that if something persists through generations and generations and generations, it's got to serve some purpose. So a lot of us would probably think about the road state, the boredom state, the frustration state and say, those are things we want to avoid. What

purpose could they possibly solve? But I'm guessing they probably do serve an important and meaningful purpose. I think they do serve a purpose. First of all, we find in our research that people are actually happiest when they're doing something that's rote. Why? Because they're engaged with it, but it's very easy, right? So it's not stressful for them. Broad attention can have a calming effect. The purpose that it can play is enabling us to pull back from doing the hard work of focus and allowing our resources to replenish and kind of, you know, building our tank back up. Of course, there are other things as well we can do to replenish, like taking a walk outside in nature. But broad activity can most certainly serve a purpose. And when we think of some of the great artists and scientists, they generally incorporated

some kind of road activity into their day. And I'm thinking of, there's an illustrator, Myra Kalman, who talks about just the pleasure she gets from doing a simple activity like ironing. Right. And there was actually a piece written up about that. She just loves this road activity of ironing. I have a friend who's an MIT professor and he loves the activity of matching socks. When the wash is done, he loves this kind of calmness of just being able to match socks for his family. I've talked to lots of people, people have various kinds of rote activities that they like to do. Knitting is a favorite for some people or even doing simple gardening. One person I spoke

to likes to just bounce a ball against a screen. Sometimes road activity, because we're not using a lot of mental resources, can help ideas to incubate in our minds, right? So we have some spare capacity, and this can sometimes work in the background of our minds and help us come up with new ideas. I don't know if you've ever read a book called Daily Rituals. Yes, I know that very well. Right. And what's amazing is that so many of the people that we hold up as the greatest writers,

scientists, artists, innovators through many generations, when you look at their 24 hour cycle, they have that time built into it. And it seems like it's almost fairly sacred, like the meandering, the wandering, you know, the flannering around, it's a part of their process. And when you see it so often, it really, you really start to wonder, is that actually critically, though maybe undervalued, part of a creative or innovative or generative process? My favorite story from the book Daily Rituals is of Beethoven. And he used to have a ritual of pouring water over his hands. And he'd pour the water back and forth and back and forth, even to the extent that

the tenant downstairs used to complain with the water pouring through the floor. But he said that he used to compose during that time. He would actually compose music in his head. There was something about this ritual that helped him. Another favorite ritual that I read about is the philosopher Wittgenstein, who peeled potatoes and said he got his best philosophical ideas from peeling potatoes. Now, you have to be somewhat engaged, right? But it doesn't involve a tremendous amount of mental effort to peel potatoes. But he was able to think in the background and he came up with great ideas. I love those examples. And I'm also really glad to hear that I'm not a weirdo for enjoying pairing socks.

Or maybe I am, but I'm in good company. I can assure you, you're in very good company. Excellent, excellent. We've been sort of exploring some of the myths that you talk about also. Maybe I am, but I'm in good company. I can assure you, you're in very good company. Excellent. Excellent. We've been sort of exploring some of the myths that you talk about also. One of the other myths that I thought was really interesting is around the notion of flow. I think this was a concept that a lot of us have experienced.

It was popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It's this state of absolute absorption people experience almost on a level of bliss. And it's become held up in culture as this, it's the ultimate aspiration. It's the ultimate state to aspire to. They have a different lens on this. I do. And first of all, the notion of flow is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as the optimal experience. It's when people are extremely creative, you're so deeply immersed in something that time doesn't seem to matter.

It sounds great, right? And it is great, but it's also not realistic. And let me explain what I mean by that. Before I entered the field of psychology, I actually was an artist. So I had studied art. And I used to get into flow regularly, when I worked in my studio. And, you know, sometimes hours would go by. And then all of a sudden, I would notice, oh, my gosh, it's like two or three o'clock in the morning. I probably should get home. And so I would enter flow regularly. And it was the nature of the work that I did that enabled me to enter a flow state because art is inherently creative. And if you talk with people who play music or people who do sports or dancers or people who have a hobby like doing woodworking, it's very easy to enter a flow state,

right? These are inherently creative activities. But if you're a person who does knowledge work, and a lot of the work that we do during the day is not necessarily conducive to flow. So what do I do? I conduct research, I analyze data, I write papers, I interview people. All of these activities involve my doing analytical thinking, right? I have to work hard to concentrate on what I'm doing, but it doesn't necessarily get me into flow. Occasionally, if I'm brainstorming with someone, I might get into flow, but most of the time I don't expect to. And I've studied lots and lots of knowledge workers over the years, and people report the same kinds of things that maybe in a group brainstorming session, they might get into flow. If you're doing complex coding, people can get into flow. But for most of the kinds of activities that people do,

especially when we use our devices, it's not realistic to expect that we get into flow. But I want to point out, it's not a bad thing. It doesn't mean that it's not rewarding or fulfilling. It can be extremely fulfilling. The mean, the work I do is so rewarding, but I'm not in flow and I can recognize the difference from when I was an artist and got into flow regularly. Now that makes sense. So it's less about, you're not saying there isn't value in this state. It's just the realistic nature of the way that so many people work, especially in a knowledge work-related field, there are a lot of hurdles to being able to enter into that place and then stay there for any meaningful amount of time. So I almost wonder if the aspiration at that point

then becomes more a point of frustration because it's just like, well, I should be there. I strive to be there, but I just can't. So maybe there's something wrong with me or what I'm doing. Yeah, it's an interesting frame. I think the same thing. I think that there are these expectations that we should be getting into flow. And if we can't, there's something wrong with us. Maybe we're not creative people. And I would say, no, of course you're a creative person, but put yourself in a different situation that gives you an opportunity to experience flow. Play music, play sports. I mean, there's a lot of opportunities to experience flow. Doing rock climbing, you can experience flow. Flow is really about experiencing the right balance of using your skill and also having the right amount

of challenge. If you're watching a Netflix movie, that's not being in flow, right? It's really about something that people are performing, something they're doing. But I have to emphasize that if you don't get into flow, for anyone who expects that they should and feels guilty about it, it's an unrealistic expectation to think that we should be in flow so often. So let's think about what might be more realistic, which is understanding what your personal rhythm of attention is and leveraging that and designing your day so that you're doing the hardest work and the work that requires the most creativity for those times when your attention is at its peak and you will perform

well and you'll feel rewarded. Yeah. No, I love that piece of advice. And I want to drop a little bit more into some of the things that we can do, but I also want to unpack that number that we started out with a bit more because I'm curious about it. And I'm sure our community is that, that 47 second on a screen before we switch things and maybe zoom the lens out a little bit, because you've, you brought up a number of times this, the relationship between attention and technology. We live in a world now where we're pretty much tethered 24-7 to something, to some form

of connectivity, some device, some technology, and often many, many different things and applications all at once. So talk to me a bit about your lens on the relationship between technology and how it has been affecting our attention. So it's most certainly has affected our attention. We live in a digital world. A lot of people propose doing digital detoxes. And, you know, I would say, sure, it works for a while, but it's just like a crash diet. You can cut off technology for a while, but, you know, then you come back and have the same habits. And so rather than thinking about how we should be separating from technology, let's think about how we can better integrate

technology into our lives. And most certainly, we're overusing technology. We're using technology in the wrong way. And of course, we don't have that ability to have agency over our attention to be able to control that flashlight beam, right? To narrow it when we need to, to have it wide and diffuse when we need to. It's hard for us to control our attention, to not check social media, email, news, and so on. So what's better is for us to live with technology, but learn how we can gain agency over our attention when we use it. So one half of it is, I completely agree is that, but what about the part of it that is, we can say, yes, let's have a sense of agency and learn to use technology better.

But to a certain extent, I don't think I'm alone in feeling that at certain moments in certain ways, we're also being used by technology and not just by technology, but by those who are behind technology. Because we live in an ecosystem where the biggest pieces of technology that we interact with, especially on a leisure-oriented way, but also in a work-oriented way, they're built around financial structures where for many of them, the users are the product. So there's huge financial incentive to keep us tethered and constantly engaging with applications, platforms, technology, as long as humanly possible. And billions of dollars that go

into actually understanding algorithms that will do that more effectively. So how do we do this dance? You're absolutely right. And I have a chapter in my book on just the dangers of this kind of targeted algorithms and the power of algorithms and all the digital traces that we leave when we go on the web are collected and incorporated into algorithms and profiles are constructed about us. And this enables advertisers to be able to target ads that can really get at our most basic emotions according to what might attract us, depending on our personalities, right? If you're someone who's

neurotic, you might be receiving an ad that's designed to tap into our basic fears because neurotics tend to have a lot of fears. If you're an extrovert or introvert, you might be targeted with an ad, you know, depending on what your personality type is like. So absolutely, you know, our attention is being monetized. And of course, we need the web for our jobs. You know, we need it for connecting with people we love and our friends, for looking up medical information. I mean, there's so many different ways that we absolutely need to use the web and these digital traces we leave behind when we use the web are collected and used to capture our attention, to hold it hostage. So that is absolutely a part of

it. But I will also claim that that's not the full story. It's absolutely a part of it. I can't deny it, but it's not the full picture of what's going on. Yeah. And you used that word agency before, which really it's the notion that regardless of whatever the structure is of the technology that we're interacting with, we are human beings. There are things that we can do. There are things we can know to really help that relationship become healthier, to help direct our attention in a way which is constructive and adaptive rather than destructive and maladaptive. Yeah. I just want to say that if we have this view that we are fully being controlled by targeted algorithms, that removes all agency from people.

And in fact, I even write about this notion of free will in the book, and I raise it as a question, given all the influences that exist to try and capture our attention, do humans even have free will when we use the internet? And I argue that we do, right? There are constraints, of course, but I do think that people have free will. And I think the better way to reframe this question about free will is to frame it in terms of gaining agency of our behaviors. Yeah, I love that because it puts the ball in our court to a certain extent. It says, we have a role here. There are things that we can do. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him! We need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. You know, moving beyond technology, one of the other things that you talk about and you write about is this notion of multitasking. And I've heard so many different takes on this. And it's fascinating how this would fold into a conversation around attention. And in a world where it seems like the pace of everything is accelerating, expectations

about productivity and what you, quote, should be able to get accomplished is accelerating and being heightened. As much as I think so many of us have heard, well, multitasking is actually less effective and creates a lot more wasted time and switching costs and ramping times. It's still the dominant mode that we operate in. What's happening here? are monochronic. And that means people prefer to do one thing at a time before moving on to something else. The problem is that we live in a polychronic world. We live in a world that puts demands on us to behave in polychronic ways. Polychronic means switching among different tasks or multitasking. So, you know, in a workplace, of course, we would all love to do monochronic work, but we get emails, we have people coming into the office, we have meetings that we have to attend to, we get phone calls, we're constantly switching our attention based on the demands of the environment.

And so it's like we're square pegs with our preferences forced into round holes to do something that's just not basic to our natures. Now, you talked about, is multitasking a good thing? It's not a good thing. First of all, multitasking does not mean that we're doing two things fully in parallel, right? What we're actually doing is switching our attention. Now, if one of those things is automatic, like you can walk and text, walking is automatic. Sure, you can do two things at the same time. But if two things require some kind of mental effort, you can't. What we're doing instead is we're switching our attention, sometimes rapidly. So being in a Zoom meeting, I think many people have had the experience,

you're in Zoom and you're trying to do your email at the same time and you're switching back and forth. Of course, no one in our community, but we've heard about the old days. Sure. Of course. Never. We're completely innocent. And sure, it seems to work fine until your name is called on and it's time for you to answer a question or report. You have no idea what had been going on in the meeting. It's because your attention was on your email. So when people multitask, there's three things that why it's bad. Number one is people make more errors. We know that from decades of research in the laboratory. We know from real world studies, studies of nurses and physicians show that they make

more errors when they switch their attention, when they multitask. Physicians make more prescribing errors when they're multitasking, which is quite concerning. Pilots make more errors. We also know that, and you mentioned the idea of a switch cost, that every time we switch our attention to something else, we have to you move to a new task, you need a representation of what the task is about, what information you need, the way you're going to work on it. And you write that information onto this whiteboard in your mind. And then suddenly you're switching to do something else, like checking email. You're erasing that whiteboard of your mind and writing the new information that you need to do email, right? You need to understand who the sender is and

what you should delete and what you should respond to. And then suddenly you switch to do something else. You're erasing that model of email and writing new information. But in the same way that we can't always completely erase a whiteboard in real life, we can't always fully erase the content in our mind, the whiteboard in our mind. And sometimes it leaves a residue. And imagine that you read some really upsetting news article, and then you want to go back to work. That emotion can stay with us and interfere with our task at hand. The time it takes for us to be doing the switching, that is the switch cost. And it takes longer for us to perform multiple tasks compared to if we just did one right after the other. But the real nail in the coffin is that

multitasking increases stress. And we know that there is a causal effect. We know that when people are switching their attention fast, their stress goes up. Laboratory studies show that blood pressure increases when people multitask. There's a physiological marker in the body that increases when people multitask. And we found in our research, when people wear heart rate monitors, which provides a measure of stress, that when we correlate that with attention switching, we find that stress goes up. In fact, we try to control for all the things we can think of that can create stress, things like job role, job demands, gender. And even after controlling for that, we find that stress increases. So it's not a good bet to do multitasking.

If we start from that assumption, then there's this other word. I know you write about this actually, and I've heard it kicked around before that probably fewer people have heard about, but in the context of multitasking, and that's super taskers. People who seem to somehow be wired in a way where they get to opt out of a lot of the negative, they just have some super ability to do this thing. And my sense is a lot more people probably believe they're super taskers out there. So sure, people might mistakenly believe they're super taskers. And the result is they might get themselves exhausted pretty quickly, make a lot of errors. So may not be a good idea. One of the other things I'm really curious about, and it's super relevant for so many people over the last three years, is how the shift to remote work might be affecting our attention and in turn, our productivity, our mental health, our relationships, our creativity, because this has been a profoundly

disruptive shift for a lot of people, both a completely different environment, but also spending so much more time interacting on screens, even if it's synchronous real time. Have you looked at what that shift is doing to people's attention and in turn how that's actually affecting us? Yeah. We have found that people report being less focused when they work at home. So it's harder for them to pay attention to what they're doing. A study that I did with my postdoc, Judith Borgutz, found that people's motivation changes when they work at home. So when you work in a physical workplace, people tend to derive motivation through other people by working around other people. They're facilitated by having this kind of social

connections with others. When people work at home, you're removed from that. And people have to find other sources for motivation. And that can be really hard. They try to find it within themselves or try to find some enjoyment through their work, but people have a much harder time doing that. So just being cut off from all that social interaction does have an impact on motivation, which of course has an impact on attention. Because when you're motivated to do something, you pay more attention to it, right? The other thing that's changed that we found in our studies is what we call slippage into people's natural chronotypes. So if you're an early type, people who work at home tend to wake up earlier and do work that conforms to their natural biological rhythm. People who are late types tend

to sleep later. Now, that's an advantage. And that's something that people don't consider, that this might be a real advantage for working from home, that people can adapt to a schedule that's more in tune with what their natural body rhythm might be. But there are downsides, especially if you're working in a team, there may be less common time for alignment with other team members. And we found that. And so that can create some difficulties. You know, when people are in the workplace, there's this nine to five structure, whatever the time structure is, that gets people in the same place at the same time. And that structure is pretty much removed. And then the last thing I will say that can impact attention in remote work is that we've

gotten into this pattern of scheduling back-to-back Zoom meetings. And there's no transition between the meetings. And so we go from, oh, it's 11 o'clock, now I have this Zoom meeting. 12 o'clock, now I have this Zoom meeting. There's no chance to step back and take a breath between Zoom meetings, and it gets us exhausted. And when we're exhausted, it's much harder to pay attention because our precious and limited attentional resources are just getting drained.

Yeah. I think that last point probably resonates with so many people. I recently saw a friend's schedule who had 14 video calls scheduled in a day back to back that literally was a five minute break to eat something for lunch. And I was just saying to myself, at what cost, like this manic striving for productivity by just stacking meetings like that. Because if you were scheduling in olden times, like if it was in real life, you would never actually do that because you kind of had to figure in, well, I need to take a break. I need to move

from this office to this, or everybody needs to get here to there. So just logistically, you would never schedule like that. But now because people figure you can hit end one meeting and hit start another, I feel like it's created a level of brittleness in our lives, in our schedules that in the name of productivity and getting things done, that probably does the exact opposite. But also I wonder about the effect on just as human beings. When you end a day like that, where the attentional cost is almost brutalizing, what happens when you turn around and then try and live your life, your health, your mental health, your relationships? That's exactly right. When you get exhausted at the end of the day, we don't have the attentional capacity to devote to other things that might be really important to us, like family and friends. And there are carryover effects. And we know that. So the stress you experience during the day is carried over into personal life at home. And so it's so important to think of this metaphor of having a tank of attentional resources that are precious.

And there's things we do that drain our resources. There's things we do that can replenish them. And you don't want to end your day with an empty tank or near empty tank, because then we just don't have the capacity to give our attention to other things, right? After work, things that we should be giving our attention to, like our kids, our family, our friends, or even ourselves. So it's very important to not get ourselves exhausted. Yeah. I think that visual of the tank is super helpful and important. You brought up the notion, and we've talked about a couple of things where these are things to think about to actually reclaim your attention. And that notion of developing a sense of agency over it, I think it's sort of like that's the

metal lens for all of this to a certain extent. What are some of the specific ideas or strategies or tools or practices that you have explored or seen be effective in stepping into a place of having more agency or really being able to manage your attention in a way that feels healthier and better? I observe people for a living. That's what I do. That's part of my research. And I learned how I can become an observer of myself, of my own behavior. And what brought me to this idea was that during the pandemic, my university offered a course in mindfulness-based stress reduction. And I found that course to be really useful. And mindfulness teaches you to focus on the present. And I realized that when we use our devices, a lot of our actions are unconscious.

So, you know, I see my phone and I grab for it. That's an unconscious action. Or I suddenly switch my screen to go to social media or news or email. And so the idea is, you know, how can I make these unconscious actions more conscious? How can I raise them to my conscious awareness? Because if I can do that, then I can be intentional in how I behave and I can act and that's how I can change. So how do I do that? I practice what I call meta-awareness, which is being aware of the thing I'm doing as it's unfolding. And how do I do it? I probe myself. I'm continually probing myself in the same way that when I observe someone in my research, I'm always asking questions like, why did that person just switch their screen? Why is their person,

you know, doing this right now? What are they thinking of? And I learned how to turn those questions inward on myself to observe myself. So when I have this urge to check email, I pause and I ask myself, why do I have that urge? And I can reflect on it. And usually it's because I'm bored or I'm procrastinating. I mean, there's usually some reason behind it. And then I can reflect on it and say, okay, wait a minute, why am I bored about this thing that I'm doing? What needs to change? But it's enough for me to pause and stop making that switch to the other screen. And I've incorporated that into a routine and it's become second nature. And it really helps me keep on track. And it's like a muscle that you can develop. And I think anyone can develop it so that it becomes second nature. And it helps us really understand the reasons

for how we're paying attention. So that's one thing we can do. Another thing is to practice forethought. And what that means is understanding how our current actions will affect our future selves. And I think the timeframe that makes the most sense for our future selves is the end of the day. And to understand that if I'm going to switch my attention and spend time on social media, I need to visualize what my day is going to look like at 7 p.m. or 10 p.m. And what do I want that day to look like at the end of the day. I want to be feeling fulfilled and rewarded and relaxed and reading my favorite book or watching my favorite show, drinking a glass of wine. I don't want to be working on that overdue paper or overdue report. So that's enough to keep me on task. And it's really quite a powerful method.

And you can even think of your future self at the end of the week. How do you want your weekend to look at? But I think a shorter term makes a lot of sense and can be very effective. Yeah. I love that notion of really shortening up the duration because I feel like it's really hard for us. It's sort of like all of the ideas around delayed gratification. We have a fairly short window where it'll meaningfully change our behaviors because if it's just too far out, it's not real enough for us. So literally thinking about the end of the day, feel that's tangible. We can feel that. We can almost touch it in the morning. And at the end of the week, it's pretty close too. And the closer we get to the end of the week,

the more tangible it becomes. So I love that idea of shortening the time horizons there also. And these two things that you just shared, it seems like these are practices, right? These are things where you don't just start one day, I mean, mindfulness-based stress reduction or just mindfulness as an actual practice. And fix things, but this is something that we say yes to. And over time it builds, that muscle slowly strengthens and it becomes more and more effective. What do you think about complementing practices like those sort of internal inside out based practices, just really basic changes like turning off notifications on your devices? I mean, I've had, I literally, I remember when BlackBerrys first came out and I realized I couldn't turn off that little thing on the bottom of the email that says sent from your BlackBerry. And I was mortified because I didn't

want anyone to know back then that they could actually reach me at any time of day before everyone just realized and assumed that we're all connected all the time. But simple changes like turning off all notifications, are those things just kind of the icing on the cake or can things like that add up and be effective? They can be effective. And it should be a no brainer by now to turn off notifications, use ad blockers, keep your phone in another room. In other words, create friction for yourself to get to your phone. You don't want it to be next to you where you can so easily grab it. It's about changing your environment. All of these things,

turning off notifications, it's about changing the environment so that you can create an environment that's more conducive to focus. It's like, you know, we go to a buffet and then we say, oh, I don't want to have dessert. And then you walk up to the buffet table and you see all these luscious desserts in front of you on the buffet table. How can you not help but sample them, right? So isn't it better, or it's a lot easier to just, you tell the waiter, don't even hand me the dessert menu, right? Just bring me the main course and that's it. And don't show me any dessert menu. You know, by changing the environment, it just makes it a lot easier for us to have control over our attention. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I love that

visual of the buffet, and it feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. And I always wrap up with the same question. I'm curious what your thoughts are in this container of a good life project. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? I think it's so important to be with people, people you love, people you have deep friendships with, people with who you feel safe and can be creative with. There's probably nothing I love more than just being creative around other people. So for me, that's a good life to be just surrounded by people you love, you can be creative with. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode,

say that you'll also love the conversation we had with Johan Hari on how to reclaim focus and what large tech business models are doing to counter our desire to do just that. You'll find a link to Johan's episode in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person, just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered because

when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

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