Regain Control of Your Focus and Attention with Researcher Gloria Mark

ELISE HU: That was Gloria Mark. She has spent decades researching how technology affects our ability to focus. She’s a professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, a visiting researcher at Microsoft since 2012, and she has a thought-provoking and helpful new book, Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity . How can you regain control of your focus in an era of scrolling and social media? How can you work more effectively to make time for life and help your teams do the same? Gloria has tips and some insights on how AI might help us out too. All right, here’s my conversation with Gloria.

ELISE HU: Gloria, thanks for coming on the show. 

GLORIA MARK: Oh, it’s my pleasure. 

ELISE HU: It sounds like even though you study how people interact with this kind of technology, you yourself aren’t immune to the same traps that the rest of us fall into. In fact, in your book, you told a pretty funny story about wandering around, I think, a European village in Austria desperately looking for a hotspot.

GLORIA MARK: Yes. Every year, we would visit my husband’s mother who lived in a small Austrian village. And she didn’t have internet. And the closest internet cafe was like a 20- or 30-minute drive. So I used to walk around the neighborhood, holding my laptop looking for bars to appear to get a Wi-Fi signal.

ELISE HU: Let’s get into the research. What have you found since that time—I know your story took place more than a decade ago now—so what have you found about how attention spans have changed over the years? 

GLORIA MARK: Yeah, so we first started tracking attention spans back in 2004. And this was, you know, not too long after I became really interested to study this phenomenon and wanted to find out, to what extent is it widespread that people have a hard time keeping their attention on any application or screen, and at the time, we found the average attention span to be two and a half minutes on average. And this was done with people in a workplace. So it was people with various job roles—both men and women, people of different ages—and in 2012, we discovered using computer logging techniques that attention spans averaged about 75 seconds. And then in the last five or six years, we found attention to average 47 seconds. 

ELISE HU: What did you make of these results?

GLORIA MARK: I was astonished. Even back in 2004, with two and a half minutes, this was far shorter than I had expected. I thought it would be about 10 minutes or so. But you know, as I think about it over the years, we do spend very short amounts of time, say when we go to email, or even if we go on social media, we tend to spend short snippets of time on these different sites. And it’s also reflected when we’re trying to do work. You know, if you have a Word doc open, you’re trying to work on it. We also tend to keep switching our attention away from that. 

ELISE HU: Is it a problem that our attention spans have dwindled to such mere, you know, fractions of minutes? 

GLORIA MARK: Yeah, it’s a problem for three reasons. So first of all, we know from decades of laboratory studies that people make more errors when they switch their attention. There are studies done with people in offline environments. People in the medical profession, doctors and nurses make more errors when their attention is shifting—pilots make more errors. A second reason is that it harms performance in the sense that it takes more time to get any single task done when you’re shifting your attention back and forth. So, you know, imagine that you’re trying to write a paper—that’s what I do for a living, I write papers. And then suddenly, I switch my attention to check email and then switch back. 

ELISE HU: Guilty. 

GLORIA MARK: Yes, we all are. And it’s called a switch cost. Imagine that you have an internal whiteboard in your mind. And when you’re working on a task, let’s say you’re writing an article, you have the information you need for that task on this whiteboard: the topic you want to write about, the things you want to say. And then suddenly, we switch to check email. And what we’re doing in our mind is we’re erasing that whiteboard, and then we’re rewriting new information on it that we need—who is the email sender, what do we need to write? And then we suddenly switch our attention again and work on a different task, let’s say you’re checking a budget. And sometimes we can’t erase that whiteboard completely, there’s going to be a residue. And that’s going to interfere with the thing you’re trying to do right now, your task at hand. And let me mention the third reason why shifting attention is harmful to our performance. And that is that it creates stress. We know it causes stress. So when people are shifting back and forth rapidly, in laboratory studies we’ve seen that blood pressure rises. And of course, when people are asked, what’s your perceived level of stress, people also report higher stress subjectively. 

ELISE HU: How do you think that the way that we’re working now, hybrid work models, where our home lives blend in with our work lives, the line is more porous. How do you think that has affected our attention spans? 

GLORIA MARK: So the borders between work and home life tend to flow together. We’re distracted by different things when we’re at home. If you’re fortunate to be able to work in a private space, a private office, that’s better. The other thing is that when we work at home, we tend to extend our workday. It’s hard to create a structure of, now is work start time and now is work stop time in the same way we can when we’re physically present in an office. 

ELISE HU: How can we do it better? What is a more aspirational vision for human attention, whether that’s at the workplace or in other spheres? 

GLORIA MARK: You know, I can say a bit about individual solutions. One thing you can do to achieve agency over your attention is to practice what I call meta-awareness, which means being aware of what you’re doing as it’s unfolding. We tend to do so many automatic actions. When we use our devices, we might switch screens to look at social media, and that’s an automatic action. I see my phone and I might grab it, that’s automatic. And so if we can make these kinds of automatic actions, if we can raise them to our conscious awareness, then we can be intentional in our behaviors. What I do is probe. Probing is a way to ask yourself reasons for why you’re doing something. So when I have an urge to check the news—and I’m a news junkie, and I can recognize that urge—and I can ask myself, Gloria, do I need to read news right now? Why do I have this urge to check news? It’s usually because I’m procrastinating because I don’t want to do the task that’s in front of me. And when I recognize that, you know, it can help me stay on task. So another individual thing that we can do is to practice what’s called forethought. And forethought means imagining how our current actions are going to affect our future selves. And the best timeframe to think about is later in the day. So I have this urge to go on social media. I know I’m someone who’s going to spend 30 minutes on social media, maybe an hour. I have to pause and imagine my future self at 7 p.m. or 10 p.m. Am I going to be relaxing on the couch, feeling fulfilled—I completed what I planned to—or am I going to be still working on that overdue report? So practicing forethought can help put our current actions in check. Another thing that we can do as individuals is to design your day. Typically, when we think about scheduling our day, we think about scheduling things back-to-back and trying to pack as much as we can. But I’d like to change that kind of thinking. So we can design our day, first of all, to take advantage of those times when our focus is at its peak, and to arrange to do the hard work, the work that requires the most creativity, during those peak times, when we know we’re at our peak performance. And then when we’re in our troughs, you can do what I call subordinate work. There is an expression that the Japanese use, it’s called yohaku no bi , which refers to the beauty of empty space. And we should try to design empty space into our day. It’s time when you can pull back from work, time for contemplation, meditation. It’s time when you can take a walk. It’s time for you to replenish your mental resources, and it’s very important to design this empty space in your day, design it strategically. 

ELISE HU: Okay, so that is individually what we can do to sort of regain agency over our attention, or at least be more aware of how easily distracted we get. What about organizations, especially since remote and/or hybrid work is now the new normal and the reality of many jobs. How could organizations do it better? 

GLORIA MARK: Some organizations have talked about instituting a quiet time. This is a time during the day when electronic communications aren’t being sent. And, as you know, a lot of organizations have struggled with email. We spend a good chunk of our day just dealing with email. But we also found, and this was research done with my colleagues at Microsoft Research, we find that people check their email on average 77 times a day, which is quite a bit. That’s a lot of interruptions. And by having a quiet time, period of time, where you know there won’t be anything coming into your inbox, this can change these habitual behaviors of checking email so that we’re not doing it 77 times a day, right? And, you know, it might take some time to break this habit, but it can be done. So having a quiet time, you know, points during the day or even one period during the day, can certainly help rewire people’s habits and rewire their expectations of checking email. 

ELISE HU: Okay, so we’ve talked about how digital technologies can be harmful to our attention spans and the consequences of that. But could other technologies, like the advancements that we’ve seen in AI, be part of the cure, because I know that you have worked with Microsoft Research to look at how AI could now come in and maybe help people avoid distraction. 

GLORIA MARK: I did a study with Eve Kimani. She was the lead researcher, this was at Microsoft Research. The study was also done with Mary Czerwinski. And Eve had developed a conversational agent that served as a coach for people to help them understand when they needed a break, if they’ve been working too long. It would nudge them and say, Do you think it’s time for a break? When people spent too long on social media; so after, say, five minutes, this agent would nudge people and say, You know, you’ve been on social media for five minutes, don’t you think it’s time to come back now to work? And people reported that they liked having this kind of coach. And I think AI can really go a lot farther in this area to be able to detect when a person’s mental resources are getting low, when we’re getting in a trough so that people can understand it’s time to take a break. These kinds of agents can suggest the best kinds of breaks for us. So there’s really a lot of opportunity there. 

ELISE HU: I’m glad you mentioned breaks, because I’d love to know what makes a break effective. What would that look like? 

GLORIA MARK: A break is effective when you can really clear your head, get your attentional resources restored and replenished so that you feel fresh. So, you know, this happens to all of us: you’re reading, and then all of a sudden you find yourself reading the same line over and over again, or you’re trying to write and just can’t find words. That’s when it’s time to take a break, because our mental resources are getting low. And the best break of all is to go outside and take a walk in nature. And studies show that a walk in nature can be restorative. In work that I’ve done at Microsoft Research, and this was a study led by Saeed Abdullah, what happened is that people would walk outside for 20 minutes, and then we compare this against a baseline condition. And it turns out that just spending 20 minutes in nature enabled people to have better divergent thinking. And that means being able to think of more ideas and better quality ideas. And it’s surprising, but that’s an easy thing to do, is stepping outside and being in nature and taking a walk. That’s the best break that we can take. If you can’t go outside, if circumstances don’t allow, then moving around inside is also really good. But I also argue it’s okay to do some simple kind of rote activity, something that keeps you engaged, that’s calming, that makes you happy—that’s fine, as long as you can be strategic about doing it. You know, for me, I have this simple anagram game that makes me happy when I do it. But you know, I have to set limits. And it’s important for everyone to set limits, because we get rewards when we do these very simple games. And you want to make sure that, you know, we’re just doing it for a few minutes and we’re not falling down a rabbit hole.

ELISE HU: Okay, so this has been a lot of both research but also the promise that you see, the research seems to point in a direction for us that can allow us to flourish better at work and in our lives. And then in the bigger picture, we are at this inflection point for artificial intelligence and the rapid development of such. So what’s inspiring to you as you look at this collision of where we’re at, as a result of what has happened with the internet and information technologies, but also the promise of AI that we’re seeing in this particular moment? 

GLORIA MARK: Yeah, so I am optimistic. If we look back historically, the internet is relatively young, right, it didn’t come into widespread popularity until the mid ’90s. So we’re still making sense of it. I’m optimistic because I believe that we will do a course correction. For example, with technology design. It’s really important to get psychologists, people who really understand human behavior, to get them involved in the design of the systems. And you know, there are researchers, human computer interaction researchers, who work in product development. I would love to see psychologists on these design teams to help really understand what will be the impacts of this particular product on people. How is it going to affect their wellbeing? I mean, for me, that’s front and center, is to make sure that we can achieve greater wellbeing for people when they use their devices instead of getting exhausted. And AI also holds promise. AI techniques are getting more and more sophisticated, so we can better learn about people and what individuals’ patterns are, what works for an individual. 

ELISE HU: And we’ve actually seen that happen, right, with the Microsoft product Viva. It’s an employee experience platform and uses AI to help us be more intentional about the day and carve out time to focus and take breaks. 

GLORIA MARK: Yes, yes. So AI can help identify patterns in people’s work that an individual may not be able to recognize because we can only understand just so much data. We have bounds in our minds and our capabilities, what we can understand, but AI can look at large-scale patterns of our own data. Now, I do think that it’s very important to respect privacy. So people need to own their own data. 

ELISE HU: Right. I know that Microsoft, for example, has responsible AI standards and principles that help guide how they bring people to the next generation of AI. And in general, it’s been clear that psychologists, ethicists, experts in human behavior, should all be involved in these conversations. 

GLORIA MARK: Yeah, that makes me optimistic, because 20 years ago we weren’t talking about bringing ethicists on board in thinking about technology, design, and use, and now we are. So I do think there’s going to be a course correction. And, you know, I would like to see media literacy programs in schools so that even at a young age, kids can learn how to better interact with technology so that they don’t get overwhelmed with it and they don’t fall victim to technology overuse. 

ELISE HU: Okay, a lot to think about and full of insight, Dr. Gloria Mark, from the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Mark, thank you. 

GLORIA MARK: Thank you for having me.

ELISE HU: And that’s it for this episode of WorkLab , the podcast from Microsoft. Please subscribe and check back for our next episode, where I’ll be talking with technologist John Maeda, the vice president of design and AI at Microsoft, about how artificial intelligence can boost creativity and reduce tedium at work. If you’ve got a question you’d like us to pose to leaders, please drop us an email at [email protected]. And check out the WorkLab digital publication, where you’ll find transcripts of all our episodes, along with thoughtful stories that explore the ways we work today. You can find all of it at microsoft.com/worklab. As for this podcast, please rate us, review, and follow us wherever you listen. That helps us out a lot. The WorkLab podcast is a place for experts to share their insights and opinions. As students of the future of work, Microsoft values inputs from a diverse set of voices. That said, the opinions and findings of our guests are their own and they may not necessarily reflect Microsoft’s own research or positions. WorkLab is produced by Microsoft with Godfrey Dadich Partners and Reasonable Volume. I’m your host, Elise Hu. Mary Melton is our correspondent. Sharon Kallander and Matthew Duncan produced this podcast. Jessica Voelker is the WorkLab editor. Until next time.