Greg McKeown:
Welcome everyone. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, and I am here with you on this journey to learn. Do you ever feel like there’s something in the modern world that fries your brain? That leaves you in red brain, where you’re just so pulled in a million directions all the time that it’s hard to actually give attention to what’s essential? Well, in part two of my conversation with Dr. Gloria Mark, we get into some specific questions you can ask yourself to be able to assess how you are doing and what you can do to increase and then protect your peak attention hours. Let’s get to it.
Remember that If you want to get more out of each episode, take a moment to share something that you have learned that has impacted you with someone else within the next 24 to 48 hours.
Dr. Mark, let’s carry on from where we were before. If you had to take all the data that you’ve gathered over these years and give us the peer-reviewed actionable habits that we can establish to be able to thrive in this new reality, what would your number one suggestion be?
Gloria Mark:
I would say be aware of your level of mental resources and take significant breaks to make sure that you have a full tank of resources. Start your day with a full tank of resources, getting sufficient sleep. We know that when people accumulate what’s called sleep debt, that their attention spans decline. Sleep debt means that if I need eight hours of sleep a night and I’m only getting six for every night, I’m getting six. I’m accumulating a debt in my sleep. And the greater that debt, we see a correlation with shorter attention spans. So start your day with a full tank of well-rested, good attentional resources, and then throughout the day, be aware of when your resources are starting to wane and take a significant break.
Greg McKeown:
How long should that break be?
Gloria Mark:
You know, we know from research that a 20-minute walk in nature can help people significantly de-stress. My own research has shown that people can improve their divergent thinking. That means brainstorming, thinking of more ideas, better ideas. Right? So 20 minutes is very valuable. I realize that not everyone can afford 20 minutes multiple times a day.
Greg McKeown:
But, would that be ideal? Are you saying that would be the thing to do would be, as soon as your attention resource is lagging, go and take another 20-minute walk. If someone could do it, that’s what you would say was optimal based on the research?
Gloria Mark:
Yes. If someone could do it, then yes. Absolutely.
Greg McKeown:
How often would be the optimal?
Gloria Mark:
You know, we know that there’s two peaks of attention mid to late morning into late afternoon. You know, when people start the day, you know, that’s probably, you don’t need a significant break in the morning. Because people, what we see people generally doing is they do easy activities before they, you know, head off into really hard, difficult work. And so after you get to that peak focus state, you know, and you’re expending all those precious resources, then it’s time to take a really good break and build yourself up.
And then again, once you’re built up, and you start heading toward your second peak, and then you’re expending all these resources, then again, it’s time to take a really significant break after.
Now it’s also very useful to take shorter breaks. You know, take five-minute breaks, 10-minute breaks, step away. You can move around, you know, walk around inside or even, I’ve gotten a lot of flack for this, but even doing simple road activities can calm people and can help refresh them.
Greg McKeown:
What Do you mean exactly? And why have you been given a hard time about it?
Gloria Mark:
Because people tend to think that it’s a horrible thing to do, something to do a simple task that is wasteful.
Greg McKeown:
But what do you even mean then by a rote task?
Gloria Mark:
Okay, I’ll give you some examples.
The great writer Maya Angelo had what she called a big mind and a little mind. The big mind was what she used when she focused really hard. When she did her writing, her little mind was what she used to pull back and replenish. And she did crossword puzzles. The philosopher vine peeled potatoes. That was his rote activity. And he said he got his greatest ideas when he peeled potatoes.
My rote activity is doing a simple anagram game. It just relaxes me. My mind is lightly engaged, but I’m really not putting in much effort, and it gives me a chance to replenish whatever works people can do knitting. One person described he has this ball, this screen, and he throws a ball against the screen. Golf, you know, doing, putting of golf as a simple activity. Some great writers have done gardening as simple activity. So whatever works for you. And it’s not bad to do a mindless task like that because it has a benefit. And the benefit is that it can help replenish our spent resources. And we also know from research that it makes people happy. And that’s not a bad thing.
Greg McKeown:
That’s not a bad thing at all.
Okay. So help us design, then, the optimal routine for being able to implement these ideas that you are saying are the primary ones to focus on. So you’re saying sleep full sleep at night. Okay. That’s its own massive subject on its own for all of the reasons that sleep can be challenging for people. But nevertheless, that would be the ideal because then you have this maximized store of attention as you enter the day. The second thing you’re saying is after you’ve gone through big mind work, you then take a 20-minute break to go on a walk in nature or do something that is restorative for you but low-key strain on your mind. Not mindless really, but somehow, what was it?
Gloria Mark:
Small mind work.
Greg McKeown:
And that should be non-digital work.
Gloria Mark:
It ca it can be digital, but if you’ve got five minutes before a really tough meeting and you just need to get your mind a little bit refreshed, and maybe it doesn’t work for you to get up and walk around, it’s okay to do some simple thing on your phone or computer. It’s not a bad thing. What’s bad is when we get stuck in a rabbit hole when we can’t stop. That’s what’s bad. So you have to be strategic, and you have to be intentional so that what you’re doing is not going to trap you.
Greg McKeown:
Okay. Tell me more about what you mean there. I know, I can imagine what rabbit hole looks like, but are you just talking about somebody’s in social media, they get consumed down some channel, they’re there for half an hour, they’re there for an hour, maybe more, even without really noticing it? They’re on some YouTube shorts, and it just consumes them almost involuntarily. They’re just unaware that they’re even doing it. Is this what you mean by this downward cycle?
Gloria Mark:
Yeah, that’s a rabbit hole. If you need to take a short break, I would not recommend that you go to social media. I would recommend rather that you do some other kind of rote simple activity. Well, people, something that, you know, calms you.
Greg McKeown:
Why have people given you a hard time about this rote activity?
Gloria Mark:
Because people tend to think that doing what they call mindless activity is bad. The narrative is we have to push ourselves to the level of exhaustion. We should be focused as long as we possibly can. And I’m saying let’s give ourselves permission to step back. Let’s give ourselves permission to replenish. And I don’t believe we should create environments for ourselves where we get ourselves exhausted because then we can’t be productive at all.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. What you’re saying is familiar to me. The presumption that maximum effort equals maximum results is wrong. It’s not. That’s right. Logically how we are, it’s not how we are psychologically. So we are just ignoring that we’re living creatures and pretending that we operate like machines. And so we actually have very suboptimal results even though what we want is maximum results. I mean, I did a podcast episode recently about the 85% rule. The idea that if you try to maximize even focus, if you try to maximize your effort to focus at a hundred percent of the time, you’ll be far less productive than if you take something closer to the 85% level of effort. Your reaction.
Gloria Mark:
So, I want to stress that humans are unique. We have individual differences, and it’s very important for every individual to discover what their own personal rhythm of attentional resource use is. So I know when my peak is and when my valleys are, you know, I’ve talked to lots of different people who’ve been able to talk about that. So there’s no hard and fast algorithm that can be applied for all people, but people need to understand when their own attentional capacity is at its peak. I’ve had, for example, I’ve had my students do exercises where they kept a diary and would write through, you know, throughout the day what they felt their level of attentional resources were. And they did that as a way to discover when their own peaks and valleys are. And that’s something that everyone can do. You might intuitively know it already, but you can also find it out empirically by keeping track in a diary for yourself.
Greg McKeown:
Can you describe that precisely? Was the assignment that you gave to your students?
Gloria Mark:
For this class, they set timers that went off at random points throughout the day. And when the timer went off, they simply had to mark down on a scale what their level of mental resources were, what, how challenged, and how engaged they were.
Greg McKeown:
How many times, five times in a day?
Gloria Mark:
I will say that when we probed people when we did this study in the workplace, we actually probed people 18 times throughout the day. And the irony does not escape me.
Greg McKeown:
But nevertheless. So you were doing this about every half an hour when you were probing other people? Your students were doing it less than that, but more than five times a day, they set an alarm. Was it every 45 minutes? Is that what we’re talking about here?
Gloria Mark:
No, I think they did it much more frequently than that. I want to say every 20 minutes to a half hour.
Greg McKeown:
Okay, great. That’s helpful. So every 20 minutes for one day, is that the period that you’re gathering data, or is it over a longer period than that?
Gloria Mark:
So when we did it in the workplace, we did this over five days, and my students also did it over multiple days. Okay. Because a single day could be an anomaly. So you want to do it for more than one day.
Greg McKeown:
So they’ve got their journal when the alarm goes off, they’re going to do what one score or two scores.
Gloria Mark:
So they rated how engaged and how challenged they were.
Greg McKeown:
Okay, I want to slow those down, how engaged they are. So that’s just how interested I am in what I’m doing. Like what’s the tangible measure somebody can use to answer the question of how engaged they are in their task?
Gloria Mark:
How absorbed are you in the thing you’re doing.
Greg McKeown:
Okay. How absorbed. Okay. I like that word for clarity. Okay. And then the second is how challenged you are. That is the level of difficulty of the task that you are doing?
Gloria Mark:
More precisely, how much mental effort are you expending to do this? Like a task might be difficult for you and easy for me and vice versa. But what’s more important is subjectively how much mental effort am I putting into this.
Greg McKeown:
Okay. Great. And then they would give themselves a score of one to 10, or was that a Likert scale one to seven?
Gloria Mark:
It was one to five.
Greg McKeown:
One to five. Alright. So they’re doing this now every 20 minutes for five days. This gives you a good sense of your own patterns, but help us now interpret that. Let’s say that somebody listening to this gets really serious. They want to gather the data; they’re tired of just having a vague sense of the way their attention goes up or is depleted. How would they interpret the results after this five-day exercise of gathering the data?
Gloria Mark:
Yeah. I should also mention there’s a timestamp that goes with each of your ratings. And what you could do is you could create four cells. So you’ve got the horizontal dimension is how challenged a person is. The vertical dimension is how engaged a person is. And if you recall what I said earlier, when a person is engaged and challenged, they’re in a focused state, et cetera. When you’re engaged, not challenged, you’re in a state of rote attention. You can take these numbers, and you could basically map them onto this two by two framework. So four and five would be considered high engagement and a high challenged one. And two would be low engagement, low challenged three would be right in the middle. So you would just plot that right in the middle.
Anyways, the result is that you get states, you can assign a state of attention to your numbers, and then you can look over the course of the day, and you can see what your attentional state is and how it’s changed. Did you go from being, you know, wrote, and then suddenly you’re focused, and then you’re bored again. You can look at your own pattern of attentional states and how they change. And it’s important to look at multiple days so that you can get a sense of what your general pattern is.
Greg McKeown:
And then I assumed that what happens here is, as you already described, peaks and valleys. So everybody has that. It’s just at slightly different times or for different kinds of tasks. Is the design point for this data that you then try to construct a routine and set of rituals that what? Elongates the amount of high levels of attention that you’re able to give? High-quality amounts of time? Or, like, what is success using this data?
Gloria Mark:
So you can use this data, you can use this framework as a basis for designing your day so that you can take advantage of those times when your attention is at its peak. And you also know when your attention isn’t a trough, and you design your day such that you take the hardest tasks and the work that requires the most creativity and intentionally design them to do them at those times when your attention is at its peak. So don’t waste those peak times for doing email and certainly don’t do them doing social media, but you’ve got those mental resources. You can utilize them and utilize them for creativity. That’s when you’re thinking is at its top, you know, be very strategic in how you’re designing your day.
Greg McKeown:
Right. You want to make sure that you are doing the essential work of your life in those periods where you have optimal mental attention available.
Gloria Mark:
Yeah.
Greg McKeown:
And you are suggesting, I think, that there’s two likely two sets of that per day. You know that there’s a, I think I’m speaking broadly, but correct me if I’m getting it wrong, that there’ll be two big chunks of attention span to be able to mine effectively. Is that right? Yes.
Gloria Mark:
Yes. I would say for most people, yes.
Greg McKeown:
And what have you found to be the average length of those two windows of opportunity?
Gloria Mark:
I would say it’s, for most people, it’s in the range of roughly about one and a half to two hours for each of these peaks.
Greg McKeown:
And so the real risk here is that we waste those two windows of opportunity on something completely trivial instead of making sure that the most important work gets done in those two windows and that period is protected. And then, we do these other activities to make sure that we can even produce high-quality attention twice a day. Am I hearing it right?
Gloria Mark:
Yes. And we don’t want to intrude on those times by doing things like social media or email or what I call subservient work. Do the work that’s most important during those times. But we also find for most people they can’t come to work and just be ramped up, ready to go. It takes people time to slide into that state of peak attention.
Greg McKeown:
So peak attention has to be warmed up to.
Gloria Mark:
That’s the way that most people behave. Even people who are, by all measures, extremely productive. That’s how they behave.
Greg McKeown:
Have you tried to correlate how people manage their peak attention span with productivity over time or with success in the workplace over time? Can you speak to that? That there’s a, there’s any relationship between that and some of the output we would want to have in life?
Gloria Mark:
Yes. Well, as you know, understanding or getting a measure, a metric of productivity for information workers is, this is a problem people have grappled with in the research community and in management for decades. We have come up with a subjective assessment of productivity that we think works well, which takes productivity and divides it up into different dimensions. And then we ask people to rate these dimensions such as, you know, how well did you accomplish what you set out to accomplish? And what’s the quality of your work? And how satisfied are you with your work? So dimensions like that.
Greg McKeown:
So how many dimensions are there?
Gloria Mark:
We have five dimensions.
Greg McKeown:
Can you just list those dimensions for us?
Gloria Mark:
Okay.
How much did you accomplish today based on what you had planned to accomplish?
How efficient do you feel you were today in performing your work?
How satisfied were you in what you accomplished today?
How effectively do you feel you managed your time today?
How would you evaluate the quality of the work you did today? And overall, how productive do you feel you were today?
Greg McKeown:
Those are great questions, but they sound a little depressing too.
Gloria Mark:
Why? Why are they depressing?
Greg McKeown:
Well, it seems like I could ask those questions and might feel that I was falling short on some or all of them. How did people respond when you asked those questions?
Gloria Mark:
They responded across the whole range. I feel that they were asked in an objective way. I don’t feel like we are biased. I mean, there are ways to bias responses so that people would respond that they were more efficient or less efficient. But I think we had them balanced pretty well so that they were objective. But we did get a full range of responses. And that’s a good test of any kind of survey, right? If you see responses, you know, across the focus
Greg McKeown:
Yes. That follows something like a normal distribution curve. And they are terrific questions. Did any of those questions stand out as being particularly useful in helping people evaluate their day?
Gloria Mark:
You know, it turns out that the responses on these questions were very highly correlated. Extremely, highly correlated, like over 90%.
Greg McKeown:
So really, any one of them would do.
Gloria Mark:
We actually could have reduced it to a single question.
Greg McKeown:
If you were going to do that, which would you have chosen now that you did the study?
Gloria Mark:
I’m tempted to just ask the single question at the end, which is, how productive do you feel you are? But I would define that very carefully.
So I would have people read a definition where this word productive is defined by these other measures. I talked about efficiency, quality, satisfaction, did, you know, accomplish what you intended to. So I would define that for people. And then, I would just ask the single question.
But there’s one other point that I didn’t get a chance to talk about, and I think is really important. And that’s the idea of goals. The being aware of your goals. And because goals are the best shield that we have against distractions, whether the distraction is external or internal from yourself.
We did a study at Microsoft Research, this was led by Alex Williams, and we gave people a software bot, a conversational software agent that queried people; what are your goals for today?
What are your task goals? And what’s your emotional goal? How do you want to feel today? What do you want to work on today?
By getting people to identify their goals. At the beginning of the day, we found that people stayed on track significantly better, but we also learned that this effect just lasts for a short period. And so we discovered that it’s important to continually reinstate your goals throughout the day. So just once in the morning is not enough.
So how can a person do that? You can write your goals on a post-it note, set yourself a reminder what whatever it is that will enable you to keep reminding and becoming aware of what your goals are. Because attention is goal oriented. We direct our attention according to what our goals are. If my goal is to write that book chapter, that’s what I pay attention to. As soon as that goal slips, then I become susceptible to all kinds of distractions. It’s like I’m in a pinball machine. And I no longer have agency, and I’m being knocked around by all kinds of external distractors, but also by my own internal distractors. So being goal oriented is very important.
Greg McKeown:
So it feels to me as you are talking that a lot of the things you are saying are things that we have heard, that we have read, that exist out there. But what is different is because you’ve studied it, gathering empirical data, you can get to another level of precision in what you are talking about.
So everybody’s heard if you have goals, that helps with not being distracted because you even know what the focus is, but to be able to say precisely once in the morning is insufficient, is emblematic of this additive value. I think that you are bringing into this conversation. Help us then take this if you can to a, therefore, what the actionable advice for how somebody can begin to implement the findings of this rigorous research.
Gloria Mark:
Yes. So start your day with good sleep, a full tank of mental resources, understanding what your goals are, and I would say every hour, remind yourself of your goals because we found that our conversational agent’s question had an effect for about an hour and then it faded. So people need to keep reminding themselves of their goals.
Be aware, learn what your attentional capacity is when it’s at its peak when it’s at its valley. Learn your own rhythm of when your attention rises and falls. So get to know yourself, be aware of your rhythm. Design breaks intentionally into your day. Significant breaks that can help you replenish. Walking outside is the best. I understand circumstances don’t allow for everyone to go outside, so move around if that doesn’t work. Find some kind of road activity that can relax you, that can make you happy, and also allow you to replenish and then get back to work.
But above all, probe yourself. Be intentional of your actions so that you’re not doing unconscious, automatic activities, but you’re really conscious, and you can be. You can then have agency over your attention and agency over your behavior on your devices.
Greg McKeown:
That is a beautiful summary, a terrific place for people to start. It’s something that I can imagine people having to re-listen to and pause to try and turn that into a plan of action for them to be able to proceed that this has been time well spent for me. Uh, Dr. Mark, thank you so much for being The Greg McKeown Podcast today.
Gloria Mark:
Thank you for having me.
Greg McKeown:
What is one idea you heard today that caught your attention? Why does that matter so much? And who is one person you can share that with within the next 24 to 48 hours?
If you found value in this episode, please write a review on Apple Podcasts. The first five people to write a review of this episode will receive free access to the Essentialism Academy. For more details, go to essentialism.com/podcastpromo. Thank you. Really, thank you for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
