Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Science of Rescuing Your Attention Span | Gloria Mark

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

Our ability to focus is not lost, it’s just changing. Here’s what we can adapt.Here’s a horrifying fact: the average attention span has now declined to just 47 seconds on any particular screen. 47 seconds! How did this happen? How can we get anything done this way?Today we’re going to meet the scientist who’s done this research, find out what’s driving this, and what we can do about it. And the good news is we really can do things about this.We're experiencing a fundamental shift in how we think, work, and focus. It shows up in our blizzard of notifications, zoom fatigue, task switching, and burn out. Dr. Gloria Mark is the Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She has been a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research since 2012. She’s written a book called Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and ProductivityIn this episode we talked about:Four myths about attention and technologyThe problem with frequent task-switchingThe surprising (to me) value of rote or mindless activitiesHow to recognize when we are most distracted How to design your day based on your attentional resourcesHow practicing forethought can help boost our attention and focus And Her thoughts on digital detoxes This episode is part of the latest installment of an occasional series we do, called Sanely Ambitious. If you missed last week's episodes, go check them out. We talked about the science of optimal performance, and also the science of failure, meaning how to fail well. Coming up on Wednesday we’re gonna talk about what the research says about when to quit, not just your job, but any endeavor. We will put links in the show notes.Related Episodes:The Science of Optimal Performance—at Work and Beyond | Daniel GolemanThe Science of Failing Well | Amy EdmondsonSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/gloria-markSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello my fellow suffering beings. How are we doing today. Here is a horrifying fact. The average attention span has now declined to just 47 seconds on any particular screen. 47 seconds! How did this happen? How can we get anything done this way? Today we're going to meet the scientists who have done this research. We'll find out what's driving this decline and what we can do about it. And the good news here is that we really can do things about this. We are experiencing a fundamental shift in how we think, work and focus. It shows up in our blizzardive notifications, our Zoom fatigue, task switching and burnout.

But our ability to focus is not lost, it's just changing. Dr. Gloria Mark is the Chancellor's Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She's been a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research since 2012, and she's written a book called Attention Span, A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance Happiness and Productivity. In this conversation, we talk about four myths when it comes to attention and technology, the problem with frequent task switching, the surprising, at least to me, value of rote or mindless activity, how to recognize when we are most

distracted, how to design your day based on your attentional resources, how practicing forethought can help boost your attention and focus, and her thoughts on digital detoxes. This episode is part of the latest installment of an occasional series we do called Sainly Ambitious. If you missed last week's episodes, go check them out. We talked about the science of optimal performance and the science of failure, meaning how to fail well.

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with iGaming Ontario. Dr. Gloria Mark, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Pleasure. I love asking people how they got interested in, especially when I'm talking to a researcher, somebody who's gone really deep on something. How did you get interested in this subject of our attention span? So it actually started when I made the move from Germany, where I was living and working,

and came back to the US in the year 2000. Now in Germany, I was working in a large research institute. When I came back to the US, I started a job as an assistant professor. So there were a lot of changes, right? I changed country, I changed jobs, changed cultures, many different things. But it really made it clear to me with all these changes going on that I was glued to my computer screen for a very long time. But I was also switching

my attention rapidly, even though I was glued to the computer, I was switching between different apps and tasks. And of course, as an assistant professor, all of a sudden I was handling different research projects and teaching courses and writing grants and serving on committees. So that had changed too. But I really became aware of how hard it was for me to pay attention to any single thing. And so I began talking with other people and asking if they were experiencing the same thing.

This was the year 2000, right at the, I would say, when the digital age was really starting to accelerate and many people started reporting they were experiencing the very same thing. And I wondered to what extent this is really widespread. And so being a researcher, being a psychologist, I realized that I could study this empirically and see whether this really is the case and see how widespread this phenomenon was. Is it really the case? Has our, have our attention spans measurably decreased?

They have. So I started studying this in 2003 and I wanted to take objective measures. So what we started doing, my students and I would be shadowing people in the workplace with stopwatches. And every time people switched screens or for that matter, every time people switched activities, we would press stop, note the time, start when they switched to a new activity. At that time, we found the average attention span on any screen. And this was before smartphones, so it was just computers. It averaged two and a half minutes. And then software logging for computers was developed.

And so we were able to use that so we could log people's screen changes in the backgrounds while they work. It was unobtrusive. In 2012 we found the average attention span on his screen to be 75 seconds and then from 2016 through 2020 we found the average to be 47 seconds. It was not just my work, but others have replicated this. Some people found 44 seconds, 50 seconds. We found 47 seconds, but the average of all these different measures was 47 seconds. So is this definitively a bad thing? seconds. So is this definitively a bad thing? Yes, and there's several reasons why it's bad. So switching your attention rapidly between different things has three major consequences. The first is that we make more errors, and this has

been shown in just decades of laboratory research that people just make more errors when they're in a situation of multitasking, in other words, switching their attention between different tasks. There was a study done with physicians that found that when physicians were multitasking dealing with patients and other clinicians and nurses and getting beeps on their devices. They actually made war errors in writing prescriptions. So the second consequence is that it takes longer for us to do any single task. So when we're switching between different tasks, it takes longer for any single task. So when we're switching between different tasks, takes longer for any single

task to get done as compared to first finishing one task and moving on to another one, then moving on to another. That's called a switch cost. So there's a switch cost involved every time we change our attention. The third consequence, and this one's really important, is that it increases stress. So we know from laboratory studies that diastolic and systolic blood pressure rises when people are put in conditions of multitasking. We know from studies that that I've done where people wear heart rate monitors, we measure what's called heart rate variability. We know that this indicates stress has increased.

And just subjectively asking people with very well validated instruments throughout the day, you see that stress goes up every time people's attention starts shifting faster. So people make more errors, takes longer to do a task, stress goes up. Yeah, that sounds pretty bad. Is it getting worse because we're in an era now of we went from word processors to the web to social media to social media with short form video. Is that why our attention span is going down? That's a lot of the reason why it's happening. When you look back to see what happened between your 2003, when we first started measuring this

until 2020, right, you've got the invention of the smartphone in 2007. You had Facebook came on the scene in 2003. A number of other social media platforms also appeared. Of course, there's TikTok. So many different things happened during this time period. Of course, there are other reasons why people switch attention so fast. For example, we're social creatures. We seek social rewards. It's hard to stay away from email and social media. So a lot of things went on during this time period. I thought I'd seen some research that showed that while multitasking may be first of all impossible and the attempt to multitask can be, as you just demonstrated, stressful and inefficient, that in fact some degree of wise strategic task switching can

actually make you more efficient and less stressed. I believe that research was done by Medupa Akanola, who's a friend at Columbia. I could be mangling her results, but have you, are you familiar with this? I'm not familiar, but it depends on the task, right? It also depends on the conditions. Is it at the end of the day when a person is pretty stressed? Is it at the end of the day when a person is pretty stressed? Is it in the beginning of the day when a person is pretty fresh and has a full tank of attentional resources? So I think there's a lot of factors that are involved. And we look at people in situ, which means the real world environment, and we track people throughout the day. You know, it depends if this was done in a laboratory setting for an hour or was this done over the course of the day.

Got it. Yes. I want to talk a lot about what we can do about all of this, but since you mentioned how you work, you've described your approach as the creation of living laboratories. Can you say a little bit more about that? Sure. Typically what psychologists do is they bring people into a laboratory and you create an artificial model of the world and you do that. You can control certain variables to study. But as I was observing people over the years, I realized that it's just not possible to recreate all the conditions that exist in the real world and model them in the laboratory.

So for example, people have stress, people experience conflicts, people have social interactions. All of these things just can't be reproduced. So I thought it was better to go to where people are and to be able to study people in their natural work life environments. So to do this, we use a variety of different kinds of sensors so that people can move around, do their work as they naturally would, without being encumbered by having other kinds of measuring devices attached to them. So we used computer logging software, as I described. We started using heart rate monitors to measure stress. We later moved to using wearable devices to measure heart rate, which in turn can give us a measure of stress. We've used small lightweight wearable cameras.

They're called SenseCams, which take continual photos. We run facial detection software on them, which can detect if a person is present or not. So we infer if people are having a face-to-face conversation. We use probes. People are constantly reporting their subjective interpretations of what's happening, such as how stressed they feel. Then we give people a variety of different kinds of instruments, personality

tests, test measures, a chronic stress. And we sync together all of this information in time. So at any particular time point, we see how fast they've been switching their attention, what their stress level is, we might get their subjective perceptions of what they're doing. So we get a pretty comprehensive picture of what's going on. I can imagine. All right, let's talk about some technical terms that might help us understand the rest of the conversation. What are cognitive resources? You can think of cognitive resources as our attentional capacity. So it's the amount of mental capacity we have

for doing something. I like to use the metaphor of a tank. So if you have a really good night's sleep, you wake up, you feel really refreshed, you're starting your day with a full tank of resources. And then throughout the day, these resources get depleted depending on things we do. So switching your attention rapidly

will deplete the resources. Having focused attention for quite a long time on something which involves a lot of effort can also deplete resources. But on the other hand, there are things that can replenish these resources. For example, taking a break, taking a really nice break and pulling away from your screens can really replenish us so that when you go back to work, you've got a little bit more resources in your tank. All right. So just a few other definitional questions here. What are attention traps and framing errors? So attention traps are behavioral patterns that people can fall into where their attention

just gets lured by something and it's very hard to break away. For example, there is the rote attention trap. There's a lot of rote activities that we do when we're on the web. By rote activity, I mean an activity that's engaging, that really holds our attention and that's easy. And we want to keep doing it over and over again, like playing a simple online game, browsing social media, internet surfing. These are all examples of wrote attention. And it's easy to get trapped. So imagine when you're playing a very

simple game and you keep getting rewards because you keep, you know, killing the zombies or increasing your level of play, you know, you get glued to this game and you want to keep going. That becomes a trap. That's fascinating. And there are a few other traps that maybe worth talking about. There's the identity trap, the social media trap, the sunk cost trap, and the attention wandering trap. Yeah, let me talk about the identity trap. You know, a lot of people place very high importance on their online identity. In real life, you know, maybe you don't have such a great job. But online, you can be a master and you can get a lot of followers and you can become an influencer and you can become an online celebrity. So some people put a

lot of attention, time and effort into developing their online identity and that can become a trap because people can spend an inordinate amount of time working on maintaining that identity. Well, it's fine, but if you have other things to do and you have a job that you need to take care of or you have friends and family who you should be paying attention to, then that's not so great. The sunk cost trap is also really interesting. You know, as you probably know, a sunk cost is if you invest time and energy into doing something and it's just not working out. It's really hard to pull away because you figure, gosh, I've already invested so much into it. If I just do it a little bit

more, right, I'm going to succeed at it. So let's say you start a business and you're losing money, but you keep thinking, okay, if I just keep going, it's got to work out. And it doesn't. The rational thing to do is simply stop, cut your losses, pull away. We do a lot of things online where we get into a sunk cost trap. For me, a really good example is if I'm reading a very long article, such as a New Yorker article. And, you know, it's quite lengthy, and I through part of it and then I think, oh, I've already read so much, I better finish this.

And finishing it might take another 30 minutes and I may not have 30 minutes to spend doing it. But if I stop, you know, I'm going to see it as, you know, I've wasted that time already that I put into it or watching a YouTube video. Once you start, nobody wants to stop after 10 minutes because you've already invested that time. You're already engaged with it.

So you might as well watch it through to the end and that might be another hour. The smart thing to do is to realize that maybe you're not getting additional benefit, right? Or you're just getting increasing marginal returns. So the best thing to do is simply stop and pull away. The social media trap is probably, and also the attention-wondering trap, those are probably self-explanatory. But I also asked about framing errors. What are framing errors? Yeah, people can make framing errors. And framing refers to the particular way that you understand a context when you make a choice.

And there's two kinds of framing errors that it really important to consider. So the first is that we can misjudge the amount of value that an activity has for us. So how worthwhile something is. So you might feel, for example, that if you work on the Sunday New York Times crossword, it's gonna bring you a lot of value, but then all of a sudden you discover, well, it's only serving to make me frustrated. I know for me, I can get frustrated working on it. The second kind of framing error is that people

are notoriously bad at estimating how long some activity would take. And so people might think, oh, I'm just going to go on social media and spend five minutes browsing it, and all of a sudden 30 minutes, 45 minutes have gone by where people go on YouTube thinking, I'm just going to watch a snippet of a video and they misunderstand how much time they can actually spend doing something. This happens also a lot with TikTok. People might think, oh, these are short form videos. I'll just watch a few and before they know it, an hour has gone by.

So it's really easy to make these kinds of misjudgments about the activities that we're doing online. Yeah, people forget that when you engage with a social media app, I think I stole this from somebody else, but it's basically you versus the most powerful supercomputers on earth. And so the odds of you winning are quite low. Yes. So this has been helpful to walk through some of the terminology and like I said, we are going to get to your plan for helping us achieve some sanity in the midst of this. But perhaps the next thing to do would be to walk through these four myths that you lay out in the book, four modern myths with regard to our relationship to technology. The first myth is that we must always strive to be focused.

What does that mean? All right. So the first myth is that we should strive to be focused as long as possible when we're working on our devices. And if you Google, you'll see all kinds of expressions that say, how to focus nonstop, how to focus for 10 hours. And it turns out that people don't have the cognitive capacity to have this kind of long-term focus because it requires mental effort to really concentrate. And people can't do that

endlessly. We need to take breaks. We need to pull back. We need to understand that our attentional capacity is limited. And so, you know, focusing nonstop for lengthy periods just doesn't work. Another myth is the idea that we can just get into flow when we get on our devices. Well, it turns out that for knowledge workers, these are people whose main job concerns working with digital information. This could be anyone from being a lawyer, being a financial analyst, software developer. These kinds of jobs require more analytical kinds of thinking. And we found in our research that reaching flow for the typical knowledge worker is pretty rare. However, it doesn't mean that it can't be rewarding and fulfilling to do the kind of work that they do. So I used to be an artist. I started out in art and I would get into flow regularly. Art is a very creative endeavor.

And I knew that if I started working in art, I'd get into flow and it would be two o'clock in the morning and all of a sudden I didn't know what happened with the time. But I now do knowledge work. I use an analytical mindset. It's different from flow. I'm not going to become so immersed that I lose touch with the passage of time, but on the other hand, I'm analyzing things.

I might be doing calculations. I'm writing things very carefully, searching for words. And it's very rewarding and fulfilling but it's not necessarily flow. If I want to get into flow I can do art. So people who do sports and play music, do sculpture, do woodworking, it's very easy to enter flow. It's not so easy if your job involves some kind of more deliberate analytical thinking. And the third myth is that all of the distractions and interruptions and multi-tasking we do

is do primarily to the fact that we're constantly being pinged by notifications and from our own disastrous lack of willpower. So say more about that one. People often think that distractions and interruptions can be attributed solely to the notifications and ads that we get on our computers. But it turns out that there are so many other things that affect our ability to pay attention. We live in what's called a sociotechnical world, which means that there are social forces,

there are technical forces, and all of these things affect our attention. For example, there are individual differences, personalities. Some people are born lucky with very good self-regulation. Others are not born so lucky. We are social beings. We see social rewards. And so it's very hard to not respond to an email when someone sends it. We see social capital.

So, you know, I'm going to do a favor for you because I'm hoping you're going to do a favor for me. So, the internet is a marketplace of social capital where we're always exchanging favors by responding to each other's messages. There are technical forces like algorithms. So, algorithms have become increasingly more sophisticated over the years. When we go on the web, we leave digital traces of our behaviors. So algorithms can mine the internet for our behaviors,

what we click on, what we choose to like, how long we've been on a page, and it can construct profiles about us. And then notifications and ads can be geared so that it really targets and hijacks our attention quite precisely. And it can be very captivating, and it can be hard not to pay attention. The very design of the Internet, I will claim, was to distract us. And people may not realize that, but the original design of the Internet came from Vannevar

Bush in 1945. This was the person who was head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research. And he devised a different way to organize information. So at the time, the standard way to organize information was the Dewey-Desmos system, which is based on organizing information by categories. And he realized that's not how people think. People think in terms of associations. He thought information should be organized by how it's associated with other information.

That's how our minds are organized. So the theory of semantic memory is that we make associations. If you say cat, I think of dog. When you go on the internet and you read, say, a Wikipedia page, all kinds of associations come to mind. You see a link? Click on that link, and that spurs a whole other line of associations. We click on something else and it maps on so well to the way our memory is organized. Can you imagine if the Internet was designed like the Dewey Decimal System? It would be very hard to surf the Internet if it was done that way. And then another socio-technical force that I mentioned is the shot lengths of film and TV. So shot lengths started out much longer and they have decreased so that

they now average about four seconds. Now, I'm not claiming that this causes our attention spans to be short, but what I am claiming is that it reinforces our already short attention spans. So going back to this myth that it's only the notifications, it's only those ads you see on the screen, there's so much more that's involved in distracting us. And the fourth myth is that wrote mindless activities that we do has no value. Many people will claim that we should not do anything like wrote activity, going on social media, playing mindless games.

None of this has any value for it. But if we go back to the idea that people have limited attentional resources, and sometimes it just makes a lot of sense to pull away, if you're especially if your mind is getting taxed and you're starting to feel really exhausted, you should pull away. Now, of course, the best break to take is to get away from your advice, to move around, to go outside, especially in nature. But if you can't do that and you've got a few minutes before your next meeting, it's okay to do some brode activity. The great writer and poet Maya Angelou talked about her big mind and her little mind. And her big mind was used for doing deep thought, for doing her

writing. But every so often she would pull away and she would use what she called her little mind, which she used for doing puzzles, crossword puzzles, games, easy activity, wrote activity. And this helped her take a break and replenish. So it's not bad to do wrote activity. Some people knit. One person I spoke to has this ball that he throws on a screen in his office. This helps him relax.

The danger is in getting stuck in a trap where you might end up spending an hour doing this productivity. So, if you're a person who knows you're going to get stuck in a trap, set a timer, right? Make sure that you're not going to get stuck and just spend a few minutes doing it. But just to be clear, you mentioned knitting and throwing a ball, but you're saying it is kosher to do road activity on the phone or the computer if we've just got a few minutes. So for example, sometimes I will walk away from my desktop, lie down and watch TikTok for 10 minutes. I'm actually pretty disciplined, so I won't get sucked in too long.

But if I was the type of person who would get sucked in, you're saying, it's okay to do it, but set an alarm. Yeah. Set a timer to make sure you don't get lost in it. I have simple online games that I do, online Scrabble, online anagrams, which I'll do for a few minutes. And it just helps me relax. And, you know, they're engaging, they're easy, they're fun, and it's okay to do that for a few minutes, but don't get stuck in a trap. Coming up, Dr. Gloria Mark talks about how we can boost our attention span, how to recognize

when we're most distracted, and how to design your day based on your attentional resources. Hi, I'm Anna. And I'm Emily. We're the hosts of Wanderer's podcast Terribly Famous, a show where we bring you outrageous true stories about our most famous celebrities. Our latest season is all about the catwalk queen Naomi Campbell. The years Naomi had to fight to be treated fairly in an industry that was overwhelmingly white. That drive saw her break down barriers and reached the pinnacle of high fashion. But it also got her into some dangerous situations when it spilled over into an anger she couldn't control. In our new season, Naomi Campbell's model behavior, we tell the story of how a young girl

from South London became a trailblazing black icon, but had some very public falls of how she stood up to the British tabloids and won and the length she had to go to to be the first black woman in history to make the cover of French Vogue but she risks losing it all when her explosive behavior lands her in court. Follow terribly famous wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad-free on Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery App. and resources to help you hire persons with disabilities at Canada.ca slash right here. A message from the government of Canada. So far in this interview we've talked about the fact that our attention spans are going way down.

We've defined some terms, we've walked through some of the myths. Let's get super focused now if you're okay with it on what can we do about it? Is there anything that I as an individual can do to boost my attention span? Given that as we've established, the diminution of our attention spans is pretty negative. Yeah. So, one thing that I've learned to do is to probe myself to understand better when I'm distracted. So, there are so many things we do that are just unconscious. So I see my phone and I immediately grab it, swipe it open, or I might see a notification,

I click on it without thinking. What happens quite often to people is they interrupt themselves. They have an urge to check email or an urge to read the news or check social media. These are unconscious urges, but if we raise them to a conscious awareness, then we can act on them. We can be intentional and we can change. And I do this by learning to probe myself. So, I'm continually probing myself to recognize when I have these urges. Do I really need to read the news right now? Okay, so let's say I'm reading the news. I'll probe myself. Am I still getting value? I'll probe myself. Am I still getting value? Okay. I've read a few paragraphs. Am I still getting value? The answer is no. Go back to work.

So this kind of probing exercise may not be easy at first, but if you do it enough, it becomes second nature. And so I've now learned to sort of catch myself. If I'm about to switch screens to, you know, go to a news site, I recognize that urge, and then I can ask myself, do I really need to do that right now? And a way to be intentional is to form a plan and say, okay, I'm going to work 30 more minutes, and then I can reward myself, okay, I'm gonna work 30 more minutes and then I can reward myself and then I can go to the news and spend some time reading it. I think I don't know you well, we just met,

but I'm assuming based on our conversation, so it's a somewhat factual assumption that you have a reasonably good executive function. I know I have reasonably good executive function, but many people do not. They have ADHD or just a struggle staying on task. So is this kind of continuous self-monitoring that you're suggesting truly accessible for the vast majority of people? That's a really great question. Yes, it's true that people with ADHD, it's believed that they have a disorder of executive function. So it may not work for such people. I would say that most people

have reasonably good executive function, so it should work for most people. Executive function can get worn down. If we get really stressed, if we get really exhausted, our executive function is just not going to work the way it should. And so it's really important to not let ourselves get into that kind of a state. You know, you can imagine, you're just working yourself through to exhaustion.

That's not a good idea. I just read a study that was done in Sweden where they had a group of people who were extremely stressed and exhausted and compared those with controls. People who were not stressed more than normal stress. And they found that the people in the first group, the really exhausted people,

they got tired much quicker when they were doing tasks. And it's attributed to their executive function just being worn down and it's just struggling to do its job. And it is just not able to allow people to perform at their peak. The Swedish study demonstrated that when people are exhausted, their executive function just can't work the way it's supposed to. You know, executive function can help people the way it's supposed to. You know, executive function can help people stay on task, stay focused, and resist distractions.

But if you're at a point where you're very exhausted, your executive function just can't do the job it's supposed to. And you become more susceptible to distractions. And it becomes much harder to stay focused. So it sounds like aside from instituting a program of continuously reminding yourself, questioning yourself about what you're doing and what you're about to do in your digital life,

actually like a very basic thing, like making sure you have enough sleep and are getting some exercise and are taking sufficient number of breaks, that really can help your attention span. That's really important. And people tend to design their day in terms of writing a to-do list. You know, it's eight o'clock, here's what I need done. 9 o'clock this task, 10 o'clock this task. What people rather need to think about is designing your day in terms of your attentional resources,

understanding when you're at a peak with your resources, when they're starting to drain and when it's time to step back and take a break. Now, there's a Japanese expression called yohakunobi, which means the beauty of empty space. And I just love this. I used to be an artist, and we learned about the value of empty space or what's called negative space. So if you're doing a painting of someone, the space around the person becomes as important as the figure itself, because that space helps define the person and really helps that image come through and shine.

helps that image come through and shine. And so when you think about designing your day, think about designing empty space into your day. Don't ignore those times when you're not doing work. And what do you do during those times of so-called empty space? Well, you could meditate, contemplate, you can go outside and take a walk, but intentionally design into your day

times of respite to give your mind a rest. And then when you come back, you'll be able to perform even better. Yeah, I know that the way I do my schedule is on a good day is when I wake up, I write for 90 minutes to two hours first thing in the morning, then I take a break because I really can't keep it going that much longer. And I usually meditate for a while, you know, 30 to 60 minutes, and then I write for a little bit longer, and then I exercise and have lunch.

And then the afternoon, I either go back to writing or I do a bunch of podcast interviews and meetings. And I find that I know that at the end of any given chunk of work, there's a reward in the shape of getting to move my body or getting to relax. And that just kind of helps me keep going. Yeah. So sometimes when we pull away, we think, oh, we're wasting time. We're not doing work.

But our mind is still working. And ideas can be incubating in the back of our minds, especially if you have a problem. It's a really tough problem and you can't solve it. It's pretty amazing how you can pull away, you can take a walk outside, you come back, and all of a sudden you see this problem very differently. And you're seeing it with fresh eyes, you've got more attentional resources to devote to it, and things look very different. Yes, I have found that to be true many, many times. We've mentioned meditation a couple

of times and I just wonder, you know, the first thing you said when I asked how can we increase our attention spans, the first thing you said was, I, Gloria, try to remind myself throughout the day to analyze what am I doing and why. And I would imagine that mindfulness meditation, which produces a kind of self-awareness, would be a way to supercharge that piece of advice. That's exactly right. And that's how I came up with this practice of probing myself. During the pandemic, my university offered a course in mindfulness meditation. And it was wonderful. I really enjoyed it. And as you know, mindfulness is about focusing in the present, right? You focus on your breath to keep your attention in the present.

And I realized that when we're on our devices, it's also really important to stay focused on the present. This can help channel our attention. And so that's how I came up with this idea of probing myself. And I call it meta-awareness, which is an awareness of what you're doing in the moment as it's unfolded. And this helps us pay better attention to what we're doing and be more aware of, you know, are we being distracted? It makes us become more aware of our urges if we, you know, decide we want to check news or check social media, right? Because so many

of these urges are unconscious. And we just do that without thinking very carefully or intentionally about what we're doing. Yeah. I can also wake you up when, you know, if you're giving yourself a break and you heard Gloria say you can do rote mindless activities on your phone, that's okay. That's kosher and you're giving yourself a stensibly a five minute break to, you know, look at TikTok or whatever it is. And an hour later, you're still there and you haven't eaten and you need to go to the bathroom and you're really pissed and hating your life.

Maybe at some point you can wake up during that process because you've learned to self monitor or to have some mindfulness and that can be very useful. Yes, absolutely. Coming up, Gloria talks about how practicing forethought can help you boost your attention and focus, her thoughts on digital detoxes, and how to rethink your relationship to your devices. Quick reminder, we're offering subscriptions to the 10% happier meditation

app at a 40% discount until February 1st. Go to 10%.com slash 40. That's 10%.com slash 40 for 40% off. Hello, I'm Elizabeth Day, the creator and host of How to Fail. It's the podcast that celebrates the things in life that haven't gone right. And what, if anything, we've learned from those mistakes to help us succeed better. Each week, my guests share three failures, sparking intimate, thought-provoking, and funny

conversations. You'll hear from a diverse range of voices, sharing what they've learned through their failures. Join me Wednesdays for a new episode each week. This is an Elizabeth Day in Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. So we've talked about probing, we've talked about creating empty space in your day, we've talked about mindfulness. What else do you recommend in terms of boosting our attention span in an era where our attentional faculties are under assault? So another thing that we can do is to practice forethought. And forethought is about imagining our future selves. And the future selves could be far in the future, or it could even be at the end of the day. And so,

if you're a person and you know that if you go on TikTok, you're going to get stuck, caught in an attention trap for an hour. First, imagine yourself at the end of the day. And where will you be? How will you feel? Where do you want to be? How do you want to feel? So I know at the end of the day, I want to feel fulfilled and rewarded. I want to feel relaxed. I want to feel like, wow, I really accomplished something today. And I can reward myself by, you know, having a glass of wine, relaxing, you know, being with my husband, being with friends.

That's where I want to be. The more concrete your visualization is, the more powerful it is. So think about practicing forethought and imagining our future self. Now, the last thing you want to be doing is that it's 10 o'clock at night and you're still working on that deadline. And I've been there. I've done that. It's not fun. And you don't want to be doing that. You want, you know, if I have a paper deadline, I want that sent out, finished by 5pm so that the rest of the evening I will envision myself celebrating and being relaxed.

So I wake up in the morning and I'm thinking about my day. I want to make a little mental note to say, okay, how do I, can I create an image of how this day ends and have that be my north star throughout this day. Yes, exactly. So again, the more concrete that image is, the more powerful it will be. So it shouldn't just be an abstract idea, but really imagine yourself. What will you be doing? What will you be feeling?

And that can really help keep you on track. What's your view on, a friend of mine wrote a book called How to Break Up with Your Phone. Catherine Price, great book, recommended. She recommends lots of ways to sort of keep yourself away from your phone, like charging in in a different room instead of an exterior bed. She also talks about digital detoxes. Where are you on those types of steps? I mean, a digital detox is great, but it's temporary.

And it's like going on a crash diet. You can go on a crash diet, you can lose a lot of weight, but the research shows that the weight usually comes back. And it's the same with digital detox. We need to change the way that we use our devices, not just pulling away, getting refreshed, although it's very valuable. It can be a great thing to do, but we really need to rethink how we're using our devices. We live in a technological world. The ship has sailed. We can't go back. We need to think how to use our devices more intelligently so that we're not stressed,

we're not exhausted, so that we can really reach peak performance. So again, I'm not a fan of digital detox as being the main solution to help us cope with tech. I think we actually have to change our practices of how we use tech, how we view tech. Right. That makes sense because a digital detox, While it might have some temporary benefit, it is not going to help you navigate a world where interaction with technology is pretty much non-negotiable. So we have to change our practices for interacting with all of these technologies.

So what are your practices and what do you recommend? So I do agree that if you're a person who can't stay away from your phone and you've got to do work, you can leave your phone in another room or you can lock it in a drawer so you create friction. So it's harder to get to that phone. The same thing with apps. If you know that you're really susceptible to going on TikTok, bury that app, right? Make it really hard to get to that app so that it requires effort to be able to get to it and open it. So we can design ways to create

friction for ourselves for doing things that we know are going to distract us. So that's a really good technique to restructure your environment so that it's more conducive to working. So creating friction, what about having a rule? I sometimes, sometimes I'm able to do this, sometimes I'm not. Sometimes I'll say, I'm not gonna check my phone first thing in the morning. And in fact, I'm gonna dive right into my writing for a little while, and often I'll

try to do it outside so it gets some direct sunlight. And I will set a rule of, like, I'm not looking at my phone until a little bit, you know, mid-morning or whatever. How does that sound to you as a way to create a little bit of friction? So that could work. But let me also tell you about something called the zygarnic effect. So Bluma Zygarnik was a psychologist and about a hundred years ago, she discovered that people tend to remember unfinished tasks pretty well. And they can bug us, right, until we get them finished.

So if not checking your phone is going to come back and bug you, and you're going to be wondering, what am I missing? Or you haven't checked your email in the morning, and you keep thinking, oh, maybe there's something really important that's going to come through. That's the way I function. I need to get these things off my plate. So I check email in the morning, check my phone in the morning,

and then it's off my plate, and then I can start to work. The zygarnic effect can be pretty powerful and it can interfere with our current thinking. So sometimes it makes more sense to be able to take care of these unfinished tasks. I was laughing while you were saying that because it brings true. And I do find that sometimes I see things on email, Slack, text, social media that are so innervating that actually just blocks my ability to be creative.

So I would rather live with the Zangarnik effect than the rage effect. That absolutely can happen. Yeah, for me, it's the other way. For me, I cannot get these unfinished tasks out of my mind. So I have to deal with email phones and so on before I start work. And so, so you find that if you deal with email stuff on your phone, et cetera, et cetera, you can actually clear the decks, you know, because I think for some of us we engage with

the phone and email and it's just, it's a slippery slope. It's a, it's what's the word of I'm looking for a briar patch, you know, we just can't get out of it. It's a quagmire, it's quicksand, all of those words. You find you can dispatch with that business and then get down to work? Yeah. I mean, you just have to be committed. You get it off your plate, and then you can start working. And I am a fan of batching email, which means looking at email just at select times during the day. So you might look at it right before you break for lunch, or you might look at it after lunch, look at it at the end of the day. So one of the things I found is that email ages really fast. And so if you don't take care of an email right away

and you wait, then sometimes it'll be taken care of and you come to it and you say, oh, the problem has already been solved. So sometimes it doesn't hurt to just let it wait. Yes, yes, that's actually, that says beautiful when that happens. What are your other policies? I'm curious about your personal policies.

Like, are you able, while you're doing focused work, not to switch over to email and or to reach over to your phone to do Candy Crush or whatever it is? I can if I keep probing myself to stay on track. And it has helped me quite a bit. The other thing that really helps me a lot is to keep goals in mind because attention is goal directed.

We pay attention to what our goals are. If my goal is to finish this paper, that's what I'm gonna pay attention to. If my goal is I want to do something fun, then I might go to social media. So the thing is to be aware of what our goals are. I did an experiment with colleagues at Microsoft Research, and at the beginning of each day, we asked people two very simple questions. The first question is, what do you want to accomplish today? So that was the task goal.

The second question is, how do you want to feel today? That's the emotional goal. And so this primed people to be thinking of their goals, these two goals at the beginning of the day. And it helped keep people on track, but the bad news is that it didn't last that long. And so what we learned from that is that goals are slippery, they're dynamic, and it's really important to keep reminding ourselves about our goals to help keep us on track To help direct where our attention is So that rhymes in my mind with what you said about

Creating a mental image of what you want to do at the end of the day both of these seem to be sort of The establishing of North stars that help keep us on on a path. That's right. Yes. So keeping those goals in mind and whatever it takes, I mean if you have to write it down on a post and now do it, right? If that's what's gonna work for you. But the important thing is to always keep reminding yourself of what your goals are and it's also important. You know, most people just think of task goals, but they neglect to think about the importance of emotional goals as well. And it's very important for us to have emotional goals.

What's my goal for the end of the day? I do not want to be stressed and exhausted, right? I want to feel rewarded. I want to feel happy at the end of the day. And how am I gonna achieve that? What do I have to do to feel happy and fulfilled by day's end? And so that's also what can guide us through the day.

What do you recommend for employers to create an environment that helps us with our attention spans rather than pulls us in a million different directions all the time? So some employers have instituted quiet time. And what this is, is a period of a couple of hours during the day where electronic communications can't be sent. And this relieves people of the burden of having to answer emails or Slack messages or texts or phone calls, and it frees them up so they can focus on their work.

Email has a lot of norms and expectations wrapped up in it. And these expectations are that if someone sends you an email, you should be responding right away. And it's even worse with Slack, right? There's an expectation. You're always gonna be on Slack and monitoring it and responding to it. But having a quiet time can help reset expectations, right?

And help people be able to focus better. Another thing that employers can do, and this actually I have seen at a broader societal level is what's called the right to disconnect. So France has the El Comrie law, which does not penalize workers who do not answer electronic communications after work hours. So they can't have repercussions for not answering emails or slacks or texts. Ireland has similar policy. Ontario, Canada has such policy.

Actually, the city of New York tried to create this policy, but they had an open forum and it was definitely not accepted. But I think that having the right to disconnect is really important and it's very powerful because it gives people time to psychologically detach from work. It gives them a period of time. You leave work, you can psychologically detach you can psychologically detach and clear your mind and replenish your resources, you can sleep better. It also helps people psychologically reattach to work the next day, where they can be more engaged and more motivated. So we need to allow people a period of time to really break away from work before diving in again the next day. Yeah.

And as you said, it kind of loops back to something you said earlier about how breaks can help us be more creative. If we're in a position of power, we should be giving breaks to our team because even though they may not be as responsive on like a hair trigger at any moment we want them, they're actually going to be more creative and happy and productive in the long term. Yes. And, you know, having exercise rooms in organizations, it's wonderful. And, you know, giving people permission to be able to go and exercise and encouraging them to

do this is really important. What's your take on Zoom? I find, and this is a point of some tension with my team who are mostly younger, but as an older person and my older than my team, I'm in my early 50s, I find that Zoom, or even doing what we're doing right now, being on video chat, it's harder for me. I feel like I'm in a panopticon, you know, like there's nowhere to hide. Whereas if I'm on video chat, it's harder for me. I feel like I'm in a panopticon, you know, like,

there's nowhere to hide. Whereas if I'm on the phone, I really actually can pay much more attention because I don't feel surveilled. I can walk around. I can toss a ball up in the air. I could take a walk through the park. But I can really listen to people in that way. What does the science say about all this? So the problem with Zoom, and this was especially true during the pandemic, is that we would have meetings scheduled pretty often. And it would be 10 o'clock. You have a Zoom meeting, 11 o'clock, noon, one, and so on.

There was no time to transition between Zoom meetings. So if you're in a face-to-face office environment, at least you have time to walk to the conference room, right? And so you have a few minutes to clear your head. And then before the meeting, there might be time for chatting with people. So there's some social interaction. And Zoom removed all that. Interaction became very structured, very formal, and there were no breaks in between the meetings. That's not healthy. And so people became very exhausted after a day of, you know, you might have six, eight Zoom meetings in a day, back to back. That was not a great idea idea and it really caused stress

Yes, I thought I Remember that vividly and I still you know if I see I have a bunch of zooms on my calendar in the afternoon It makes me unhappy. Do I have any evidence-based case for saying can we move some of these to the phone? So I'm not aware of studies that have compared Zoom meetings with phone meetings. There might be. I'm just not aware of them. We have done studies of people working remotely. One of the things that we found that helped teams who were using Zoom was when team leaders allocated a certain

amount of time before each meeting for social interaction and for check-ins, for people to just talk informally about things before the meeting actually started. So allocating, you know, five, ten minutes at the beginning of the meeting really helped people. It helped them, especially when they were working from home, where many people were socially isolated. And it really helped them bond better with their colleagues to have this social interaction. I know that some team leaders were very good about scheduling meetings that were purely social with their employees. And this helped motivate them, right?

And it helped relieve some of the loneliness that people were experiencing working from home. I do wanna ask about what we can do vis-a-vis children, but before I do that, let me just ask, is there any other practical advice for boosting our attention span that I have not given you an opportunity to deliver? So one thing to consider, and this goes back to what we talked about at the very beginning, the idea of nonstop focus being a myth, is that we found in our research that there are rhythms for focused attention. So we did a study where we had people respond to two very simple questions throughout the

day. This was in a workplace. We asked them how engaged were you in the thing you were just doing and how challenged were you in the thing you were just doing. And we had timestamps so we could see exactly what time it was when people responded. And we developed a framework of attention where if you're engaged and challenged, we call that focused attention. Because to be focused,

it involves some amount of mental effort. And of course, if you're engaged and not at all challenged, that's route attention, like playing solitaire, not being engaged, not being challenged, that's boredom. And if you're very challenged and you're just not engaged, we call that frustrated attention. So for example, if I

have a tech problem, I'm really challenged and I'm just not engaged with it, but I'm kind of forced to have to solve it. We found that when we looked at the focused attention throughout the day, we found there were rhythms, that people had peaks. There was one peak that generally happened around mid-morning, and then a second peak that was mid-afternoon. Now, there are individual differences. So it depends on your chronotype. If you're an early type, your attentional capacity peak will be much earlier. If your person who sleeps late and you don't start work until later, if your workplace allows this, then your attentional peak will be later. So what

we're seeing is the average for people. So I would say it's really important to understand what your own personal rhythm of focused attention is. And it corresponds to the ebb and flow of your attentional resources. Now, it's easy to find that out. I've had my students keep diaries and they simply record throughout the day how challenged and engaged they were.

You can also learn your chronotype. And I think most people have a pretty good idea of what their chronotype is. And you can intentionally design work to be done at those times for when you know it's your peak focus. So if your peak focus is mid-morning or early morning, plan to do those things that require the hardest work, the most creative energy, do it during those times. And other times when you're in a valley, right? You do what I call subordinate tasks, kinds of tasks that have to get done and don't really require a lot of mental effort,

you can do it during those times. And of course, don't neglect to take breaks. Breaks are so important. And finally, what about kids? I, we are not parental Luddites. We do let our kid interact with his iPad and occasionally he'll steal my phone to check his standings on fantasy football or whatever.

And that's fine. We understand that this is a digital world and we don't want to keep him off of it entirely. And yet I do find that I feel some pangs of guilt or something when I see him totally engrossed in his video games or whatever. So how can we create some degree of sanity for our kids in a tech drenched world? Yeah. So it's so important for parents to be role models for kids. So it really starts with the parents.

And so we have to behave in a way knowing that our kids are watching us and they're modeling what they're doing after what we do. So I happen to be in New York City now and when the weather was warmer, I would go running in Riverside Park. And one day I saw a woman and her child was tugging at her, wanting her attention. And she was on her phone and she was completely ignoring her child.

And what does that teach the child? It teaches the child that it's okay to be on your phone, to ignore other people. And that's not what we as parents should be doing. So it really starts with us. And of course, you know, we have to teach our kids that there's a limit to screen time. And it's not just about taking screens away, but we have to think about what we replace them with. So, you know, my kids were raised without television.

And it was kind of hard for them, because all their friends had television. And it was kind of hard for them because all their friends had television. And in fact, I was really surprised how much they knew about shows just by talking with their friends. But it was really important to replace that time with books. So, you know, I'd take my kids to the library, we'd come back with a sack of books. And so, it's not about just taking things away, but we have to think about what we're putting in its place so that the kids won't miss the screen time and that they become aware that there's other things they can do

that are enjoyable and fulfilling for them and fun besides just being on screens. So based on your research, if you're raising young children right now, would you not let them interact with screens? I would not want them to interact with screens until they reached a certain age. I realize a lot of schools now do online instruction, so it's not always possible to keep them away from screens completely. But I would not want young kids to be using smartphones. I just don't think it's a good idea. And parents may want to arrange with the parents of their kids friends so that they form a pact and say,

okay, none of us are going to let our kids use screens, smartphones, so that the kids are not so affected by peer pressure from their friends. So again, it does start with parents. Yeah, yes, I think we have reached a pact with a bunch of the parents of my son's friends to not give them smartphones until a certain age, which I've forgotten the exact age, but that feels good. But maybe we're letting him have too much screen time now.

That's an interesting thing to think about. And then before I finally let you go here, Gloria, is there something I should have asked but didn't? Well, let me just say, I am an optimist. So I'm often asked if we're doomed for our attention spans to get shorter and shorter. We don't know, right? We don't know what's going to happen with attention spans without measuring them.

But I am an optimist that we will do course correction because throughout history, there have always been these horrible prognoses that the world will come to an end. But there's always been some kind of innovation that has changed the course of things. And I think that there will be innovations. People are starting to become aware of the dangers of being on our devices too much in terms of stress and exhaustion. Ironically, tech can even provide us with solutions for helping us figure out how to better use our attention and not get ourselves too tired.

For example, I can imagine having an agent, a personal agent that really understands when I'm starting to get too tired and it can teach me to recognize myself when it's time for me to pull back and take a break can make suggestions to me. So I think that the tech down the line might be developed to be able to coach us to help

us be better users of our tech. Excellent. Dr. Gloria Mark, thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Thanks again to Dr. Gloria Mark, thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Thanks again to Dr. Gloria Mark. We've done many other episodes on the subjects of focus and attention with guests like Johann Hari, Dr. Amishi Ja and the great meditation teacher Shaila Catherine, and we'll put links to those episodes in the show notes if you want to go deeper on this subject,

if you have the attentional resources, that is. Thank you for listening. Really appreciate that. We could not and would not do this without you. Thanks as well to everybody who worked so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davy, Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson. DJ Kashmir is our senior producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor.

Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post production and Kimmy Regler is our executive producer, Alicia Mackey leads our marketing and Tony Magyar is our director of podcasts and finally Nick Thorburn of Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus and the Wondery App or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.

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