There is few things more important to our daily lives as human beings as our attention. Gloria Mark has dedicated the majority of her academic career to understanding how the way we use technology is affecting our cognitive resources and attention span. She’s the author of “Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity”. We spoke to Gloria about how to manage our attention, fight distractions and designing a great day in a digital world.

Prefer the audio version? Listen to our interview on our Podcast.

Iliana: Gloria, you have dedicated a great majority of your career to understanding attention and how our digital behavior affects it. How did you originally get interested in the topic, and what would you say are some of the biggest changes you've seen over the course of the last ten or 20 years?

Gloria: I'm originally trained as a psychologist, and I got into studying tech from my first job. So my first job was to study how groups used technology in conference rooms to conduct meetings. And at this time, it was very unusual for any kind of social scientist to be working in tech, but I was fascinated with technology. So the relationship that people have with technology, how tech design affects people's behavior, how the way they use technology affects themselves, and everything kind of all came together.

At the same time, I started noticing in myself how hard it was for me to pay attention when I was using my computer. This was actually before smartphones came out, and I began to notice how I started switching screens and switching apps and scrolling, and I found it harder and harder to pay attention on any particular screen. At the same time, I found myself being just tethered to my computer. It was very hard for me to stay away. And so I started talking with other people to find out, am I the only one? And other people started reporting that they also were starting to feel this way. So I thought, being an empirical scientist, that I would study this, and I would, first of all, find out to what extent this behavior might be experienced by other people. Is it widespread? Is it unusual? And I found out it actually was quite widespread.

Iliana: We use the word “attention” a lot in our daily lives. But what is actually attention? How does it work? And why is attention so important to human beings?

Gloria: Attention is an extremely important resource that humans have. We can think of people having a set of cognitive resources or attentional resources. You can think of it as your attentional capacity, and that's what you use to process information. And these resources we have are limited. And they drain. And if you're working on a very hard task, you will find out that you start getting exhausted pretty quickly.

Iliana: What are some of the things that we do on a daily basis that affect our attention?

Gloria: One of the things that people do is they switch their attention very frequently. So they might have one screen where let's say they're reading something and then suddenly they switch and check email. Then they'll switch again to go to social media. Then they'll switch to read some article. So we find it to be commonplace behavior for people to be switching their attention, sometimes pretty rapidly. We also find, and this has been measured empirically using heart rate monitors, that people's stress goes up as they switch their attention. And this has also been shown in laboratory studies in psychology, that when people multitask, they're switching their attention, performing different tasks, that blood pressure goes up.

Iliana: In your book, you mention the concept of “attentional states”. It seems that similar to our circadian rhythm, we have a rhythm throughout the day with times when we can focus better and times when we can do less so.

Gloria: So one of the attentional states that you're talking about is when people are engaged with something and they're expending mental effort. And we label this a state of focus. Now, you can also be engaged with something and you're not exerting much mental effort at all. You're playing a simple game on your phone. When you do that, or let's say you're looking at social media or you're reading the news that we call a rote kind of attention, you're engaged, but you're not exerting much mental effort. Now, it turns out that if we look at the state of focus, we find a rhythm throughout the day. So people don't have constant focus throughout the day. You can't lift weights all day without getting exhausted, right? You would run out of energy. And we find the same thing with people's attentional capacity.

And so how do you get to know it? Well, I would start by finding out what your Chronotype is. And many people know intuitively what their Chronotype is. You know, if you're an early person or a late type. And those people that we've studied have their peak focus times mid to late morning and then again mid afternoon. Now, if you're an early type, you're up at 05:00 a.m., you're ready to get going an hour later, your peak focus, of course, is going to be earlier in the day. Other people who are late types tend to, if you are on your own schedule, wake up later and your peak focus times would be later in the day.

So that's a start: to get to know your Chronotype and then the next thing is start to become aware of when you might be feeling exhausted. Now, it's interesting because we might think intuitively we know when we're being exhausted. I used to work straight through and at the end of the day I was exhausted and I wasn't taking the breaks that I needed to. I'm a lot wiser now and I can sense when I'm starting to feel exhausted. I can probe myself, I can ask myself: “Gloria, how are you feeling? Are you still able to focus?” Well, and if I can't, then it's time to pull back and it's time to take a break and replenish. Because you can actually do more, right? If you try and fill up the entire day with hard focus, you're not going to perform well. You need to pull back, you need to replenish and then you can go back and do hard work again.

Iliana: What is a good way to replenish our batteries?

Gloria: Well, the best break is to be able to go outside and take a walk. Studies show that even a 20 minutes walk in nature can make people less stressed. We've done a study where we show that 20 minutes walk in nature can lead people to have significantly more ideas. It's called divergent thinking. It's like brainstorming. Now, I understand that circumstances don't always allow for people to step outside and certainly may not allow for them to be in nature. So the next best thing is get up, stretch, walk around. But I also will say that it's not bad to pull back and do some easy rote activity. And we know from some of the great artists, writers, scientists, that they have used these kinds of easy activities to help them pull back replenish. And you can use it strategically. And that's the key. That's the key is to use it strategically. I'm not telling people: Yes, go on social media all day. But I am saying that when it's time for a break, when you need to replenish strategically, yes, you can do something easy. But then you have to be able to pull yourself out, and you just use it for enough time that it takes for you to be replenished, for your mood to maybe calm down, and then you can go back to work.

Iliana: In your book, you suggest developing “meta-awareness” to better manage attention and energy levels during the day. Is there something that you would recommend to develop this insight into yourself and your digital behavior better?

Gloria: So I'm a professional observer of people in the sense that in my research, I observe people. And when I observe people, I've always asked questions. And I began to apply the same kind of questioning to my own behavior as a way to try to understand the reasons for why I was doing these kinds of automatic actions. Because I would check email indiscriminately, I would check news, I would go to social media. But whenever I feel the urge and I've learned to recognize this urge, I ask myself, why do I need to do that now? Is it because I'm bored? Because this is too hard? Is it habit? And the more that I've learned to recognize it, the easier it's become so it's a skill that anyone can learn, right? And if you have to put up a little post-it note to remind yourself to ask yourself these questions and this is the first step in developing agency is to become more intentional in your actions and that's what I call “meta awareness”, which means to be aware of what you're doing as it's unfolding, right?

Iliana: Can we improve our attention span when distraction is increasingly becoming a habit?

Gloria: Yes, we can. But I also want to mention that when our resources are exhausted, we have less protection in ourselves against distractions. So when we're tired, it's very hard to filter out distractions. And my research also showed that when people accumulate what's called sleep debt, that means having accumulating less and less sleep over consecutive nights. Let's say you need 8 hours of sleep, but you're only getting 7 hours and then the next night you get six and a half hours and the next night another six and a half hours. You're accumulating sleep debt. And as that debt increases, our ability to focus decreases and our attention spans decrease. What do people do? They tend to spend more and more time on easy lightweight activity like social media because they just don't have the resources available to be able to do the hard work of focusing.

Iliana: Are our phones to blame entirely for our distractions?

Gloria: So we can't blame our distractions fully on notifications and targeting algorithms. It turns out, and my research shows that we are as likely to interrupt ourselves as we are to be interrupted by any kind of external distractor. Now, we looked at our data and we looked at the amount of external distractions or external interruptions that people receive. We also looked at the times that people self interrupted. In other words, there was no external distractor, but there was something inside themselves that led them to switch their attention. And we looked at the data on an hourly basis and it turns out when the external interruptions would decrease, people's internal interruptions would increase. And it's as though the way I interpret it is as though we are conditioned to interrupt ourselves to maintain these short attention spans for not getting interrupted by something external.  

And there's so many reasons. We're sitting in front of the world's largest candy store and within milliseconds we can access information and people. It's so tempting, right? And we get rewarded when we do that, when we reward our curiosity and we're social beings who are curious. It's our natures. Let me also just mention that just the design of the internet itself with its noted link structure and with its open architecture that anyone can contribute information that also leads to our distractions because human memory is theorized to be structured as a semantic network. So we think in terms of associations just like how the internet is structured as well. And so there are so many entry points into our minds network. When you're say on a Wikipedia page you're reading content and we're just primed by so many ideas and we make so many associations in our minds, it's hard not to pursue these thoughts. And we do internet surfing and it's hard to stop because we keep getting these rewards. We're curious and this leads to being curious about other things as well.

Iliana: Do you see a future where technologies and apps are designed to promote wellbeing, rather than being the source of distraction and misinformation just to name a few of the downsides that are increasingly part of the public debate?

Gloria:  That's a great question. There will continue to be technologies that are developed to seize our attention. I think that's a given, right? There will be new and better algorithms being developed, and I don't think that's going to change. However, I also think, ironically, that technology can help us recover our attention. And there are some promising technologies. For example, at Microsoft Research, colleagues of mine and I've been fortunate to be part of these studies as well. They've developed different tools. For example, a smart personal assistant that can prompt people that can serve as a coach to say, okay, Gloria, you've been working for an hour without a break. I think it's time for you to stop and take a break. Or if I'm on social media and I'm there, let's say longer than five minutes, this assistant might say: “Gloria, you've been on social media for five minutes. It's time now to get back to work.” So I think these kinds of technologies can help coach us. They should not do completely the work for us, but they can help us learn. And that's the important thing. That's the key, to help us learn how to change our behavior so that we can be our own agents of change.

Iliana: Aside from managing our attention, is there actually a way to improve our attention or even to expand our cognitive resources?

Gloria:  There are a lot of claims that people make. Some people have developed video games that can apparently extend our attention focus and improve multitasking ability. And those are fine. My question is, do we really need those? If we take a much broader view, do we really need to push ourselves more? To what end? And what I'm saying and what my book is really about is to give yourself permission to pull back and replenish. And instead of having as a goal, our main goal should be to be as productive, to produce as much as possible. Let's consider having a main goal as optimizing our well being. Because when you optimize your wellbeing, you can produce more. There's a theory in psychology called the “Broaden and Build Theory” which shows that when people feel positive, they actually perform better and they can generate more ideas, they have more energy. And so rather than thinking in terms of squeezing in as much as possible into the shortest amount of time, let's instead think about how can we maximize our well being. Because then we'll be able to produce more and produce better quality work.

Iliana: In your book you introduce the concept of a “great day” in a digital world. How could we go about designing this great day?

Gloria: So it's really important to understand your own personal rhythm of focused attention when your attention is at its peak and when it's not. And so you can start by scheduling those tasks that require the hardest work, the most effort, where you have to be the most creative. Schedule those tasks at the times when you're at your peak and you can learn to recognize when you're at your peak and save the other times for when your resources are starting to fade. So that's how you can start. And you can also be very intentional about when you schedule breaks into your day and give a lot of thought as to these breaks because they are important, they are breaks that can frame the work, the hard work that you would be doing. And so again, by doing less, you're actually producing more. In fact, let me mention one more thing, and that's the idea of practicing forethought, which is imagining how your current actions are going to impact your future self, which could be later in the day. So if I'm going to go on social media now for an hour, what's my life going to be like? At 10:00 p.m.. Am I going to be able to relax and read a book and drink a glass of wine? Or am I going to still be working on that task? So practicing forethought, thinking about how your current actions impact what you're doing downstream later in the day, and I think later in the day is a good time frame to be thinking about. This can also help.

Iliana: Thank you so much Gloria. Are there some “parting” words you want to share with us?

Gloria: First of all, I want to emphasize that the ship has sailed in terms of us being in a digital world, and it's not possible to completely pull out. So given that, let's reframe our goal for using technology to think about how we can enhance our well being. Technology was designed to increase our capabilities as humans. Every tool that's been designed throughout history has been designed to increase our capabilities. And for information technology, it's increased our access to information so we can produce and consume more information. And of course, nowadays we can use technology for other kinds of purposes as well. We can control our thermostats with technology. But it's important to keep in mind that our main goal using technology in our digital world should be to be aware of how we can maintain our wellbeing.

We have summarised the key takeaways from the interview with Gloria below:

• Attention is goal-oriented, so understanding your goal when you go online is crucial to managing your attention.

• Practising forethought (how will this impact my day later?") will help us manage distractions better.

• Distractions can also come from within. Self-regulation and developing meta-awareness are key to managing your attention span.

• Getting to know your attentional states rhythm will be key to making the most of your day.

• Breaks are essential and incorporating them often and deliberately will help both the quality of your work and the quality of your day.

• Happiness drives good quality work (Broaden and Build Theory)

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Gloria’s book is out now. Head to the link below to get your copy.