How many times will you be distracted while reading this post? Do you know how many times you check your email in a day? What are you doing for lunch? Will you be scrambling between meetings to eat the sandwich you bought from a local grocery store? Or, quietly munching on food you brought from home before taking a 30 minute walk?
There is a battle for your attention. Notifications pop up, or slide in, drawing you away from whatever you were doing for a few minutes and breaking your concentration. Time is a precious resource and your time is even more lucrative for big tech.
People check email dozens of times. Some office workers will check it more than 400 times in a single day. Social media is reaching in even more often and stealing precious seconds. All increasing how busy we are.
It probably will be no surprise that our attention span is shrinking. Movie clips have shrunk from 13 seconds in the 1950’s to around 3 seconds. While we could hang onto a single task with no interruptions in the early 2000’s for upward of three minutes, now we are lucky to get 40 seconds of disruption-free focus.
Divide our attention
I have turned off all my notifications and attempted to streamline my email patterns – check it once in the morning and again at the end of the day. I have even turned off the ringer on my mobile.
Your Undivided Attention is a podcast hosted by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin and it’s produced by The Centre for Humane Technology. In the episode “Pardon The Interruptions,” Harris and Raskin talk with researcher Gloria Mark about her study in this field. It’s a very interesting conversation with more statistics like the ones I dropped in here and some more ideas to help you take control of your attention span or at least become more cognizant of when others are prying into it.
If you don’t have 44 minutes then hopefully this post wedged in for just long enough to get you to think about how often you are disrupted and the impact it is having on your health and well-being. However, I strongly recommend you investing the time to listen to the real experts dig into this important issue.
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