This week’s evidence comes from Professor Gloria Mark, author of the wonderful book, “Attention Span,” who shared this remarkable data in one of my favorite podcasts, “Hidden Brain” hosted by Shankar Vedantan. Professor Mark is a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, and has studied the decline of attention span around the globe in the past two decades. She measured the time that was devoted to a single screen. While I do my best to live a life of focus, her data suggests that I’m kidding myself.
Here’s the raw data on attention duration.
2004 – 2.5 minutes
2012 – 75 seconds
2020 – 47 seconds
Other researchers have replicated these observations, and 47 seconds is the mean of several studies.
These workers checked e-mail on average 77 times a day.
A Georgetown computer science professor has documented the cost of switching tasks, with an estimated 21 minutes required to focus entirely on the original task. The most common complaint of teachers and administrators is “I just don’t have the time,” a plainly untrue statement as we all have the same amount of time. However, the constant interruptions, meetings, and tech-generated messages to teachers and administrators deny them the ability to focus.
Finally, the New York Times recently reported that after decades of declining pedestrian deaths, the date of pedestrian deaths has, since 2009, grown dramatically. While I acknowledge that correlation is not causation, 2009 was the year that the ubiquitous use of cell phones and incidents of distracted driving and walking escalated.
Mark’s personal wakeup call was when she was double booked for two Zoom calls simultaneously. Rather than admit the mistake, she had one Zoom meeting on her computer and the other on her phone and had each device on a separate earbud, attempting to switch back and forth between meetings. It was a disaster; as we all know, multi-tasking is a myth.