Greg McKeown:
Welcome. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, and I’m here with you on this journey to learn. Everyone is distracted by technology. Everyone is distracted by things other than technology, and all of us have experienced this sense that our level of distraction is increasing. Even the speed with which we move from website to website, from app to app, seems to be increasing in pace. And there’s lots of people out there willing to talk about what we should do and how we can improve. But very few of those people have the data to help us think through this problem and what to do about it with precision. And that’s why I’ve invited Dr. Gloria Mark onto the podcast today.
Dr. Mark has spent 30 years studying attention and the relationship between humans and technology. She’s published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers. So the difference when she speaks, even when she says things that sound like you’ve heard them before, is that she has a detail and data-driven perspective behind what is being said. In other words, she’s more credible, she’s more accurate, and it really is a pleasure to have her. By the end of this episode, you’ll be able to establish and protect your peak attention windows of opportunity. Let’s go
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. Gloria Mark, welcome to the podcast.
Dr. Gloria Mark:
Thank you so much for having me.
Greg McKeown:
Can you give us a Reader’s Digest version of your career so far?
Dr. Gloria Mark:
Yeah, so I’m a professor at the University of California Irvine, trained as a psychologist, so I take a psychological perspective toward the use of our information technology. And so, for the last over two decades, I have been studying people’s relationship with their devices. And what struck me the most is how our minds and behavior, and specifically our attention, have changed over the last two decades in using our computers and phones.
Greg McKeown:
What’s the primary change you’ve noticed over that 20-year period?
Dr. Gloria Mark:
There have been a lot of changes. Stress has increased, but one of the most striking changes is that our attention spans, in other words, the duration of time that our attention spends on any screen, that’s diminished over the years.
Greg McKeown:
So not just speaking about attention span in general, you mean the amount of time we actually spend on a particular screen has reduced over time? Is that what you’re saying?
Dr. Gloria Mark:
That’s correct. When we first started measuring, this was back in 2004. We found the average span to be about two and a half minutes, and this is measured empirically. And then over the years, we found that it declined, went down to 75 seconds, and then the last five, six years, it’s averaged about 47 seconds on average. This has also been replicated by independent studies as well, within a few seconds.
Greg McKeown:
So why does this matter?
Dr. Gloria Mark:
It matters for a lot of reasons. First of all, when people shift their attention so fast between different activities, it’s multitasking. And we know that this is not a good thing for several reasons. First of all, people make more errors when they multitask. We also know that performance on any activity suffers, and it slows because there’s something called a switch cost. And the switch cost is the time it takes to reorient to a new activity.
It’s like we have an internal whiteboard in our minds, and every time you go to a new activity, you have to erase your representation of that task and write a new representation. And so if I’m writing, say, a book chapter, I have a representation in my mind. I know the content I want to write about; I know the information sources I have the words I wanna use. I have that representation on this internal whiteboard in my mind. When I switch and check email, all of a sudden, I’m erasing that whiteboard, and I’m writing a new representation of, oh, who is this email from? What am I supposed to do on that email? Et cetera. What’s the work I need to do? And throughout the day as you’re switching your attention so fast, you’re erasing and rewriting on that internal whiteboard.
But let me tell you, probably the worst reason that affects us when we switch our attention so fast. And that is that it causes stress. And we know this from decades of laboratory research. We know blood pressure goes up; we know that there’s a physiological marker in the body that indicates people are under stress. My own research where, I look at people in the wild, in their natural work environments or living environments when they wear heart rate monitors, we see that stress increases as their attention switching increases.
And then the last thing is people report perceived extra perceived stress when their attention shifts. So it’s not a good thing to have our attention be switching so rapidly like this.
Greg McKeown:
Well, what’s the difference between experienced stress and perceived stress?
Dr. Gloria Mark:
That’s a great question. So there is a physiological stress that’s measured by things like heart rate variability. You can get hormonal responses in the body like cortisol. There’s also perceived stress, which is psychological stress.
And the two of those generally correlate. They don’t always though sometimes a person can be aroused, and you know, could be because you’re excited, and it doesn’t mean that you feel negative stress, but for the most part, these two measures are correlated.
Greg McKeown:
What is different about the research that you have done compared to the general knowledge that people have now about multitasking and how difficult this is for people, and how stressful they feel as they’re doing it? What does your research add to the body of knowledge generally held in this subject area?
Dr. Gloria Mark:
I think you could say that I w I was probably the first person to identify multitasking with our devices. And this was back in 2004. Now people
Greg McKeown:
Three years before the iPhone for a sort of a point in, in context for people listening.
Dr. Gloria Mark:
Yeah. There was a paper that I wrote with my graduate student that was called “Constant, Constant Multitasking, Craziness”, that I identified this problem that we’re facing.
Now, one thing that’s different, I would say the main difference is that people have studied multitasking in laboratories. So, in other words, they would bring people into a laboratory, they would conduct experiments, and they would measure lots of different things about multitasking. For example, people made more errors. People became more stressed, performance load, things like that. But I felt that to really understand how people really behave with their technologies, you have to go to where people are. And so I created what I call living laboratories, where I would go into people’s actual work environments, living environments. I used a variety of sensors so that I could measure people’s multitasking and their stress, and their behavior as they went about their daily lives. So I didn’t constrain people to being in a laboratory, because in a laboratory, there’s just so many things you can’t model about people. You can’t model people’s chronic stress, you know, the interactions they have with colleagues, the things that make people laugh. You just can’t model that. But if you go to where people are in their actual, you know, environments, then you can capture their use of technology alongside all the things people do in their day-to-day lives.
Greg McKeown:
When you think back over this three decades of research, what most surprises you about the moment we are in right now,
Dr. Gloria Mark:
There’s a lot that I can say to that. You know, it’s the frog and the boiling water. And when I look back now, I guess I am amazed that this behavior has become normalized. You know, we look at it now, we’re pretty surprised that, my gosh, every 47 seconds, we switch our attention. In fact, if you look at the median, the median measure is 40 seconds. It means half of all our measures showed people’s attention to be 40 seconds or less on any screen. But this has become normalized, and people don’t question whether this behavior is, you know, should we be doing this or not. And people are surprised when they hear the figure, but it has happened so gradually over the last few decades of using our devices.
Greg McKeown:
Do you find yourself doing it?
Dr. Gloria Mark:
Yes, I do.
Greg McKeown:
Do you have any data on it? Do you know that you are above or below the average, for example?
Dr. Gloria Mark:
Yeah. I’ve honestly never measured my own behavior. I have tested all of these devices. Perhaps that’s not true. I do have data on myself. I’ve just not really analyzed it and looked at it. But I have tested all the sensors that I use on other people. But I would say, because I’m much more aware of this, especially since I started studying this, I take steps to prevent myself from switching my attention so rapidly.
Greg McKeown:
What steps do you take?
Dr. Gloria Mark:
One of the main things I do is I’ve learned to probe myself to better understand my actions. A lot of what we do is unconscious. A lot of our actions with our devices have become automatic. You know, you see your phone, you grab it without thinking, right? That’s an automatic action.
And attention has two types. You can have controlled attention where you’re real; you’re conscious of what you’re doing. It’s effortful. And there’s also automatic intention, which doesn’t require any effort. And it’s also not in our conscious awareness, but when I probe myself, it’s a way to make these automatic actions more conscious for me. And when they become conscious for me, then I can be intentional toward them. If I have an urge that I want to check the news, and I’m a news junkie.
Greg McKeown:
Yes, I understand. I can relate to that.
Dr. Gloria Mark:
I love to check the news, but I can recognize that urge, and I can probe myself, and I can ask myself, Gloria, do you need to check the news now? Why do you need to check the news? It’s usually because I’m bored with my task or I’m procrastinating. I just don’t wanna work on the task. But I identify that, and I can say to myself, okay, I don’t need to check the news right now. How can I make this task less boring?
Greg McKeown:
Are you familiar with the 1-sec app?
Dr. Gloria Mark:
I’m not, no.
Greg McKeown:
So 1 sec is specifically designed to force people to take a deep breath whenever they open social media apps. So it’s simple and effective because it just produces friction between that desire for instant gratification. It makes those apps less appealing. You set, let’s say, 30 seconds of blank time when you go to the app so that you are forced to do a self-probing exercise. You have to notice you arrived there instead of automatically being in that infinite pool. I think that’s consistent with what you’re describing.
Dr. Gloria Mark:
It is, and it sounds very useful, except I prefer not to rely on software as proxy agents for people. In other words, that software should do the work for us. I believe that people should develop their own agency. It’s like having training wheels on your bike, and you never learn to ride the bike. I would much rather that people learn to develop the skills to be able to do this on their own instead of relying on, you’re offloading the work onto the software to do it.
Greg McKeown:
I think this gets to an interesting question dilemma because it does feel quite remedial to have to download an app to help us not utilize other apps. What you’re saying makes perfect sense, and I’m with you. And on the other, when I think about the trillions of dollars that have now been spent studying and then an almost infinite experimentation system that is being played out constantly in people’s use of social media where that feedback loop is adapting to each person’s specific tendencies and being updated in its algorithms so that it becomes more and more addictive and sticky over time. I sometimes think we are no match for this. Like humans are not built to be able to handle that level of sophisticated, intelligent learning. What’s your reaction?
Dr. Gloria Mark:
Yes, absolutely. Algorithms are very sophisticated. We can’t deny that, but I do believe that humans have more power than algorithms do. First of all, turn off your notifications. That’s number one. Number two, it turns out that people are just as likely to self-interrupt, to interrupt themselves, as they are to be interrupted by some external, an add an algorithm.
Greg McKeown:
What’s the data on that, by the way? What’s the percentage that you found?
Dr. Gloria Mark:
Yeah, the data we found is 49% of the time, people interrupt themselves.
Greg McKeown:
And so, almost exactly half of the time, it’s internally based versus an external notification or a text or an email or something coming at you. That’s what the current data is.
Dr. Gloria Mark:
That’s right. For example, with email, we did a study with email, and we find that roughly, you know, a third of the people we studied rely on notifications to check email. It was over 40% simply checked of their own accord. And then the rest had some kind of mixture. That’s just with email. But overall, for any kind of interruption, we find that people are about as likely to interrupt themselves. So, we can blame algorithms, yes, they’re quite powerful, but it’s not the full story. And you know, the easiest thing is to just turn them off.
Greg McKeown:
Okay. So let’s go into that uncomfortable half the half that is internally generated. What is your understanding of why people do that?
Dr. Gloria Mark:
There’s a lot of reasons why people self-construct they’re bored. Sometimes it’s at a breakpoint in the task, which is a natural place to take a pause, and people self-interrupt to take a break. And that’s a good thing to do. Sometimes people self-interrupt because they want to rearrange their desktop. We’ve seen that quite a bit. But there’s also an aspect of conditioning behind it as well.
So we’ve looked at the data, we’ve looked at the amount of external interruptions a person receives. We’ve looked at that at a particular time unit. And then, we looked at the amount of internal interruptions a person receives. We look at this throughout the day. The time unit is an hour on an hourly basis, and we find that when the external interruptions fall, people’s internal interruptions increase. It’s as though people are just determined to be interrupted, and they’re, if they’re not being interrupted by something external, like a phone call, then there’s something with them that causes them to self-interrupt. It’s as though people want to maintain a short attention span, and they’re doing that through self-interruptions.
Greg McKeown:
That’s a particularly interesting phrase, determined to be interrupted. Is there an advantage to being interrupted? I know that I do this, and it feels like there’s something productive taking place. Is that true? Or is all interruption inherently stress-producing, anti-productivity, and so on?
Dr. Gloria Mark:
No, absolutely. There are benefits as well as costs to interruptions. And one of the benefits is that it allows us to take a break and allows us to replenish our very limited and precious attentional resources. And another big advantage is that we can socially connect with other people. So if you’re working, especially if you’re working alone, you know, it gives people a chance to socially connect through, say, a phone call or if it, if you’re in an in-person office environment, you can walk over and talk with someone, someone comes into your office. So there are benefits that allow us to replenish, and that’s a good thing. Now we know that the downside is that it causes stress, errors, slows performance, and, you know, it just makes it much harder to reconnect back to the interrupted task.
Greg McKeown:
Do you have data on how much of the disruption is digital versus any other kind?
Dr. Gloria Mark:
I have data from when we first started doing this, like, almost 20 years ago. We categorized all kinds of interruptions. That was very laborious work because we had to shadow people and we used stopwatches. So what I have is only older data since then. We’ve been using computer logging techniques and sensors. So I only see digital interruptions.
Greg McKeown:
And just stepping out for a second, your field of focus is informatics. Can you just explain a bit more about what that even is?
Dr. Gloria Mark:
Yeah, so informatics is a term that my very interdisciplinary department came up with to characterize the intersection of people and computing. And that was the term that we use. We realized that perhaps people outside of our department may not understand that so well. But that was what we wanted to communicate.
Greg McKeown:
In your work about attention, you’ve identified four different kinds of attention. Can you break that down for us, please?
Dr. Gloria Mark:
Sure. You know, people generally tend to think of attention in two states as being focused and unfocused. And as I was studying people, I realized that attention is far more nuanced because you can be really engaged with something and putting in a lot of mental effort. So, for example, if, if you’re writing or if I’m writing involves a lot of mental effort, so we’re challenged. But you can also be very engaged with something like playing solitaire on your phone, and you’re very engaged, but you’re not at all challenged by it. So I decided that there were two very important dimensions to look at with attention. How engaged are you with something, and how challenged are you? And so the four types are when you’re engaged and challenged, it’s in a state of focus. When a person is engaged, not challenged, we call that rote attention because you’re doing a rote simple activity.
If you’re not engaged and not challenged your board, and if you’re not engaged, but you are challenged, we call it a state of frustration. Think of when you’ve got a tech problem, you can’t solve it, you’re not engaged with solving it, but you really have to solve it. So, we’ve done a study where we gave people very short questionnaires. It’s a technique called experience sampling, where people receive a short probe, and they very quickly answer, how engaged was I? How challenged was I for the thing I was doing just now? Of course, we could see digitally what people were working on as well. So we did this over the course of days and examined people in all kinds of work roles.
Greg McKeown:
And what did that reveal? What’s therefore what from that particular piece of research?
Dr. Gloria Mark:
It’s very interesting. It turns out that our focus, where we’re engaged and challenged it actually has a rhythm throughout the day. And so there are peaks and valleys, and this corresponds to the fact that we have very limited mental resources. It’s a theory of mental resources that’s been, you know, tested for 50-plus years, and people tend to have peaks in their attention, those people mid to late morning and then once again mid to late afternoon. So you have peaks and you have troughs.
Now it depends on your chronotype. If you’re an early type, your peak will be early. If you’re a late type, a night owl, your peak will be later. But we do see that people don’t have constant uniform focused attention throughout the day because they can’t, because they don’t have the attentional capacity to do that for lengthy periods. In the same way that we can’t lift weights for lengthy periods of time, we need to replenish. And so what people do is they can pull back, and they can replenish by doing something easy, by doing some kind of rote activity, or by even being bored. But it’s a way to build back up your mental resources.
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?
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Thank you. Really, thank you for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
