I have repeatedly blogged about bogus statistics from the
Statistic Brain web site claiming we only have an eight-second attention span,
less than the nine-seconds for a goldfish (actually instead a gold fish). My
latest post on December 30, 2022 is titled Shallow research and less curious
than hoped.
In 2023 there is an excellent book by psychologist Gloria
Mark titled Attention and subtitled A groundbreaking way to restore balance,
happiness, and productivity. It showed up at Amazon in both the US and UK on
January 10, 2023. On page 95 she discusses attention spans for switching screens:
“Forty-seven seconds of attention
To understand how people’s attention spans have changed with
the rise in computing, I have been tracking people’s attention over the years,
using increasingly sophisticated and unobtrusive computer logging techniques. I
studied a range of participants, all of whom were knowledge workers, but in
different jobs, and in different workplaces. Most were in the age range of
twenty-five to fifty years old, but I have also studied younger college-age
students. Our observations ranged from multiple days to multiple weeks. Each
study yielded thousands of hours of observations.
The results of all this attention tracking shows that the
average attention on a screen before switching to another screen is declining
over the years (Figure 1). In 2004, in our earliest study, we found that people
averaged about one hundred fifty seconds (two and a half minutes) on a computer
screen before switching their attention to another screen; in 2012 the average
went down to seventy-five seconds before switching. In later years, from 2016
to 2021, the average amount of time on any screen before switching was found to
be relatively consistent between forty-four and fifty seconds. Others
replicated our research, also with computer logging. Andre Meyer and colleagues
at Microsoft Research found the average attention span of twenty software
developers over eleven workdays to be fifty seconds (Ref. 9). For her
dissertation, my student Fatema Akbar found the average attention span of fifty
office workers in various jobs over a period of three to four weeks to be a
mere forty-four seconds (Ref. 10). In other words, in the last several years,
every day and all day in the workplace, people switch their attention on
computer screens about every forty-seven seconds on average. In fact, in 2016
we found that the median (i.e. midpoint) for length of attention duration to be
forty seconds (Ref. 11). This means that half the observations of attention
length were shorter than forty seconds.”
Some folks have tried to advise those writing web content
based on that bogus eight-second span. Let’s assume we read at four words per
second (which is a reasonable average that I mentioned in a post on September
23, 2019 titled How many words should be on a PowerPoint slide: 6, 12, 20, 25,
36, or 49? Then we should just write a paragraph with 32 words – only a sentence
or two. Gloria’s 47-second average instead implies we can write 188 words - or
almost six times more.
Gloria also discusses different attentional states during a
workday. As shown above, these can be divided into four quadrants (as shown
above) based on high or low levels of engagement and challenge. Details are in
a 2014 CHI paper titled Bored Mondays and Focused Afternoons: The Rhythm of
Attention and Online Activity in the Workplace.
A chart which is Figure 2 in that paper is shown above.
People completely avoid the Frustrated quadrant with low engagement and high
challenge. They are most focused in late morning and early afternoon. They spend
less time Bored or Rote.
On Pages 282 and 283 Gloria discusses how we should act:
“In this book, I’ve aimed to use research findings to shift
the public conversation in how we use our devices so that the main goal is to
strive to achieve a healthy psychological balance, and to follow our natural
attentional rhythm. But you might be thinking, wait a minute, what? Shouldn’t
striving for productivity be the number one concern? Just as we can’t run a
marathon all day, we cannot experience the high mental load of focused attention
for long uninterrupted stretches without our performance degrading and stress
increasing. So instead of forcing yourself into long periods of sustained focus
with pressure to optimize productivity, instead find your rhythm of using
different kinds of attention: there are times when you can be challenged, and
other times when you need something easy and engaging. Design your day around
using your cognitive resources wisely and aim to optimize your well-being.
The public narrative that we shouldn’t allow for mindless
rote activity is not based in science. Rote activity has a function in our
lives: it makes people happy when they are engaged in activity that is not
challenging and often relaxing and helps people step back and replenish their
cognitive resources. Gardening and knitting are rote activities, for example.
Similarly, in the digital world, there are things we can do to relax and reset
and that can bring rewards such as connecting with other people. We need to
consider rote activity as part of our work that supports our larger task and
emotional goals. Of course, the best breaks are those where you can get up and
move around (but not while checking your smartphone). Taking short breaks with
easy tasks (and applying meta-awareness so you don’t get too lost) helps
replenish scarce cognitive resources, and the upshot is that with more
resources, we can focus our attention better, self-regulate more effectively,
be more productive, and importantly, feel more positive.
Give yourself permission to back off – you need not feel
guilty. We can’t all be like William James or the writer Stephen King, who are
both known for writing two thousand words a day. We have created a culture
intent on optimizing productivity, which also means more production of information,
more communication, and more information to keep up with. In our current
digital climate, we are fighting gale-force winds to keep the ship on course to
maintain our well-being.
What you can do is develop agency to achieve better control
of your attention, to get in sync with
your attentional rhythm, and with it, strive for positive well-being. The great
artists and writers knew the importance of finding their rhythms. They knew
when they worked best and when to take breaks and when to fill their day with
negative space. The writer Anne Beattie prefers to start writing at 9 p.m. and
is at her best between midnight and 3 a.m. She follows her own rhythm for her
peak focus.
We need to change our conversation in our still relatively
young digital age to prioritize our health and well-being. Computers were
designed for us to extend our capabilities, but by doing so, we are losing
control of our attention and stressing ourselves out. The idea that we get
distracted, get interrupted and multitask because of our personal lack of
willpower is incomplete. Nor is it useful to blame everything on powerful
algorithms. The realm of influence is much bigger. Our attention behavior is
influenced by a much larger sociotechnical world that we’re part of,
encompassing environmental, social, individual and other technological forces.
It's not just about our own lack of discipline. However, we can use agency to plan
and take action, like intentionally choosing how to use our attention,
to harness our tendency for dynamic attention. Using our attention effectively
in the digital world is really about understanding ourselves and the larger
environment we live in.”
Curiously there is an article by David Butcher at LinkedIn
Pulse on April 14, 2023 titled Modern attention spans: myth and reality. He claims instead
that attention spans are not getting shorter. He must not have seen Gloria’s
book.
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