881: How to Find Focus, Fight Distraction, and Boost Your Attention Span with Dr. Gloria Mark

Pete Mockaitis
Gloria, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Gloria Mark
Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to talk about your book Attention Span: Find Focus and Fight Distraction. But, first, I want to hear a little bit about how you did not start your career in the science research professor world but rather in the art world. What’s the story here and how did you make the switch?

Gloria Mark
That’s right. I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, I studied art, never thought I would be doing anything except art. Graduated from art school and then I discovered the hard reality of making a living as an artist. Now, it turns out that I was also good at math and science, and I also found those topics interesting. So, I made the switch into a science field but there is a story there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, do tell.

Gloria Mark
Yeah, I was originally just going to do a terminal master’s degree in biostatistics because you could get really good jobs.

Pete Mockaitis
It sounds like a good job field.

Gloria Mark
So, I thought that’s a relatively easy thing for me to do. But while I was at the University of Michigan, I applied for a job as a research assistant because I needed a job, and I walked into the office of Dr. Manfred Kochen. And he asked me, can I code? No. Do I know network theory? No. Do I know Fuzzy Set Theory? Nope. And I started to walk out, and he said, “Wait a minute. Stop. What can you do?” And I said, “I can paint.” And he said, “Well, come back in.” And he said before he got his Ph.D. in math at MIT, he studied art at The Art Student League in New York. And we talked about art for the next two hours.

And then he said, “Do you think you could do research on the discovery process of artists?” And I was very young and naïve and bold, and I said, “Of course, I could.” And that’s how I began to study cognitive psychology, and before I knew it, I ended up getting a Ph.D. in psychology, and that’s what I’ve been working on since.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. That’s really cool. And I’m excited to hear your insights and wisdom gained from a career spent in this domain, particularly in the zone of attention, and us humans and how we pay attention, and can do that better, and distraction and that stuff. Could you share any particularly surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about attention over the course of your career?

Gloria Mark
Oh, I’ve made a number of surprising discoveries. Maybe one of the most surprising things was actually how short our attention spans are.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Lay it on us. I’ve heard about goldfish. Let’s get this straight, the straight info from the source.

Gloria Mark
Yeah, the goldfish result is not exactly correct, so that shouldn’t be our starting point. So, when I first started tracking attention, and I’ve been studying this empirically, so using methods like computer logging techniques. We actually started studying this using stopwatches where we would shadow people and click the stopwatch every time they switch their attention. When we first started doing this 20 years ago, attention averaged about two and a half minutes on any screen. I was astounded at the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Too big, too small.

Gloria Mark
Yeah, I couldn’t believe it was that short. We continued tracking attention. Around 2012, we found it to average 75 seconds, and in the last few years, it’s averaged 47 seconds. And also, others have replicated the result. And so, again, these are all done with objective measures. We’re not asking people to self-report how short their attention span is or how long it is, but we’re actually measuring the length of time people’s attention is on any screen, computer or phone.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I’m intrigued here, look, I’m the sort of guy who, though not a researcher, will frequently want to read the full text of the scientific journal article and be frustrated I can’t get it for free online.

Anyway, all that’s to say I’m actually very interested in the details of how you conduct this research. What are you observing on the screen? And what are we seeing was two and half minutes, and now is 47 seconds?

Gloria Mark
Yeah. So, let me back up a little bit and say that most psychologists tend to bring people into a laboratory to study them. So, they create this simulated environment, this model of the world inside of a laboratory, and then they perform tests. But I thought that if we’re studying attention on our devices, it’s so much important to study what people do in the course of their everyday lives. Like, why should we pull people out of their environment? So, let’s go to where people are.

So, I created what I call living laboratories, where I used a variety of different kinds of sensors. So, these are measures that are not obtrusive. They don’t interfere with how you do work, such as computer logging techniques that will log the length of time a screen is in the foreground, and it’ll log that in the background.

We have people use wearable devices. We’ve had people wear heart rate monitors. We have had people use wrist wearables to get measures of stress. And we’ve had people wear these cameras that are called SenseCams, very lightweight cameras, you wear around your neck that can record photos. They take continuous photos so that you can then detect who people are speaking to. Are they having a face-to-face conversation? Or, are they rather online?

We sync together all these measures in real time so that we create a fairly comprehensive picture of what people are doing on their devices when they’re at work or if they’re at home. Most of the time, we’ve done this in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, that’s intriguing. So, we’re putting together a picture based on logging in the background what’s happening on the machines, as well as the photos. And so, I’m thinking, we had Dr. Amishi Jha on the show earlier, and she talked about the SART, the sustained attention response test. It sounds like maybe that’s the main difference in terms of constructing a laboratory in which you come on in.

And so, what I’ve heard is like those results are actually somewhat stable over time. Like, hey, by that measure of attention span, it looks like it’s about the same. However, you’re telling me – was it in vivo, what’s the right word, science-y?

Gloria Mark
In vivo, that’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
In vivo, yeah, got it. Feeling good. In vivo, we see a substantial decline from 2.5 minutes to 47 seconds. Is that a fair state of play under the two different ways of looking at things?

Gloria Mark
Yes, that’s right, because, don’t forget, when people are using their devices, think of everything that’s happening in their environment. So, they’re trying to stay focused on their tasks, they’re dealing with email, they have this urge to check social media, they have people interrupting their office, they’re experiencing stress, some of it might be chronic stress.

You’ve got career trajectories that people are worried about. Someone might’ve had a conflict in the workplace. So many things are going on and it’s just not possible to simulate all of that inside of a laboratory. And laboratory research is great if there’s a particular thing you want to test in an ideal kind of environment. So, something where you won’t have variables that can affect the thing that you’re trying to study, then it’s great for that. But if we’re talking about what really happens with attention in the real world when people are at work, this is what we see.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, the human capacity to pay attention is relatively the same as it’s been for decades but the real-life experience of how we pay attention has declined dramatically. Like, the vast majority of attention span has been decimated. It sounds like two-thirds reduction there. And so, when did we have two and a half minutes? And when did we have 47 seconds? What’s the rough timeline history for us?

Gloria Mark
Yeah. So, we started doing the research in 2003. It was first published in 2004. That was two and a half minutes. The 47 seconds, this is not just my work. Again, it’s been replicated by others through the pandemic. So, the last study that was done actually was published in 2020, and we find the estimates ranging from 44 seconds to 50 seconds, and 47 seconds is the average of those studies.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, Gloria, this seems like a big deal for our species, can you contextualize this for us? What does this mean? What is the implication of living lives this way?

Gloria Mark
Yeah, there are a lot of implications. First of all, this kind of fast attention shifting, it’s associated with stress, and we know that, and that’s been documented. We know in laboratory settings, when people are performing, when they’re multitasking, we know that their blood pressure rises, both systolic and diastolic blood pressure. There’s a physiological marker in the body that indicates that people are stressed.

In my research, when we measure stress in vivo in the real world, we see a very strong correlation between fast shifting of attention and stress going up, and that’s measured by heart rate monitors. We’ve also used wearables to measure heart rate.

Pete Mockaitis
And, if I may, is the physiological marker something like cortisol or heart rate variability, or what are we looking at?

Gloria Mark
It’s a more complicated marker, and it’s probably not something that listeners have heard of.

Pete Mockaitis
Gloria, I might very well get my blood tested for it. So, lay it on us.

Gloria Mark
So, we know that fast shifting of attention leads to the decreased secretion of immunoglobulin A reactivity, and that’s known as a marker of stress.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, the fast attention shifting is associated with increased stress. Well, then this kind of makes me think of maybe a little bit of a reinforcing loop. Might the increased stress also impact the way we can pay attention?

Gloria Mark
Absolutely. When we’re stressed, we’re not making the best use of our attentional resources. Absolutely. And it’s harder to focus. Another impact of this fast attention switching is that it leads to what’s called a switch cost. And a switch cost is the extra amount of time that it takes for you to reorient to a new task when you switch. So, it’s not like you can immediately switch to a new task, dive in and get focused right away, but it takes some time for you to get into this new task.

And the best way that I can explain it is by using a metaphor. Imagine that you’ve got a whiteboard inside of your mind, and every time you’re switching tasks, you’re erasing the mental model of the task that you just did, and you’re rewriting a new mental model for the new task. And just like in the real world, when you erase a whiteboard, sometimes you can’t erase it completely and it leaves a residue. And that can also happen in our mind.

And so, imagine you’re reading the news, and you read about some horrific catastrophe, and then you try to go back to work, and that stays with you. Or, you’ve just had an email and discovered that the deadline is a lot sooner than you thought it would be. That stays with you and it affects your ability to focus on the next task, leaves a residue.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, the task switching, leave a residue, we increase stress. What are some of the other implications?

Gloria Mark
Well, another really bad implication is that switching attention so fast leads to errors. So, we know, again, from laboratory research, decades of laboratory research, people make more errors when they’re switching their attention between different tasks. There was a study done with physicians not too long ago, where they observed physicians when they multitask.

So, they shifted their attentions, they’re continually being interrupted by nurses, by other physicians, patient queries, and they made, out of over 200 different prescriptions that they wrote, they made roughly like 80% to 90% errors in the prescribing. And some of those were very serious errors in terms of writing the wrong drug or the wrong dosage.

Pete Mockaitis
So, 80% of the prescriptions were wrong?

Gloria Mark
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
In a highly distracted, interrupted condition.

Gloria Mark
Do you want me to tell you the exact number?

Pete Mockaitis
Please.

Gloria Mark
So, in 2018, there was a study done of physicians, looking at the effects of them multitasking, which is shifting their attention rapidly. And physicians, of course, are distracted pretty often. They’re distracted by nurses, by other doctors, patients. And in this study, it was found that out of 239 prescriptions that the physicians wrote, 208 of them showed errors.

And most of these errors were just incomplete prescriptions but 12 of those were really severe in the sense of writing the wrong drug or the wrong dosage. So, there can be very serious consequences to multitasking. Let me also point out that people think multitasking can lead us to perform better. The idea of multitasking, of doing two things at the same time, is a myth. Humans cannot perform two things at the same time. What we are doing is shifting our attention rapidly between different tasks. And that’s what we picked up when we studied people’s attention on screens.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, with these prescriptions in the interrupted condition, the good majority of them were errors, most of those inconsequential, so I guess that’s nice. And then in the uninterrupted condition, do physicians get it right, I mean, 99 plus percent of the time?

Gloria Mark
So, this study was done in situ, which means in the real world, and so they didn’t have a condition where physicians were not interrupted.

Pete Mockaitis
They’re never not distracted.

Gloria Mark
Right. So, they couldn’t really compare what physicians do if they’re in a perfectly peaceful environment without distractions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, increased stress, switching costs, residue. And then maybe can you show us the light on the other side? Maybe is there a cool story of someone who improved their attention span and saw cool results?

Gloria Mark
Well, there are cases. So, there are ways that we can regain agency over our attention. And people very often will tell me that some of the techniques that we’ve discovered do work for people, and they’ve been able to focus better. It’s really important to consider that when you’re shifting your attention so fast, it affects our wellbeing. It leads to higher stress. And as you pointed out, we get into this cycle where, if we get more stressed, it becomes even harder to focus.

And so, people have reported the benefits, for example, of being able to take, really, significant breaks. Also, the benefits of becoming aware of when you’re starting to feel immensely tired, and taking a break, pulling back to replenish. Because by doing less, by pulling back, we can actually do more and we can be more effective.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say significant break, what does that mean in terms of length or approach, like what you’re doing?

Gloria Mark
Yeah. So, first of all, let me talk about when is a good time to take a break. So, it turns out that people are not able to have extensive nonstop focus. And if you search the internet, you’ll see a lot of sayings that advertise, “Use this technique and you’ll have nonstop focus,” “Ten hours of nonstop focus,” “Hours of nonstop focus.” It’s just not humanly possible. Why? Because people have a limited capacity of attentional resources. You can think of it as a tank.

We start our day with a tank of attentional resources, things we do over the day drain our resources. Focusing drains our resources. Shifting our attention very rapidly, that also drains our resources because of the switch costs that we talked about and because of the stress. And so, we have this limited capacity for attention.

What can we do to optimize our attention? Well, we can take breaks. Now, first of all, starting your day with really good quality sleep gives you a jumpstart on your attention, and you can start your day with a full tank of resources, or nearly full tank. So, you would be in really good shape to start your day off with a good night’s sleep.

Now, people tend to have a peak of focus around mid-morning. Most people, for them, it’s 10:00 or 11:00 in the morning but it depends on your chrono type. So, if you’re an early type, your peak focus will be much earlier. If you’re a late type, your peak focus will be later. People tend to have a second peak in the afternoon, usually mid-afternoon between 2:00 and 3:00. Again, it depends on your chrono type, if you’re an early type or late type.

Now, it’s important to understand when your peak focus time is, and you plan your breaks around that peak focus time. So, you want to make sure that you’re really well-rested and that you’re alert before it’s time for you to really dive into doing that hard work. And after working for a while, it’s really important to probe yourself and understand whether you’re starting to become mentally exhausted. And if you are, it’s time for a break.

Now, you can take quick breaks, 10-minute breaks. Those would be very useful. The best break of all that we know from research is to walk outside for 20 minutes in nature, and that’s the best replenishment that we can have for our attentional resources. I realize that not everyone can do it. If it’s the middle of winter and you’re living in the northeast, you may not be able to simply walk outside in nature.

I live in California, so, of course, it’s a lot easier for me to do that year-round. So, if you can’t go outside, you can at least move around. Take a walk, move around, make sure you’re focusing on things at a distance. You don’t want to be walking around using your smartphone, checking your email. Really detach, pull away, and make sure you have really one, two, or three significant breaks a day like that. And make sure that you plan those breaks around the time that you’re really starting to feel that your mental resources are getting exhausted.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. There we go. So, pay attention to chrono types when you’re feeling alert and when you’re not, and then take those significant breaks. We don’t have unlimited attention. To the sleep point, can you tell me, does it matter a lot or a little if, let’s say, an ideal amount of sleep for a person is seven and a half hours but, on a given night, shucks, they only got 6.2 hours? Is that a little deal or a big deal?

Gloria Mark
So, one night of poor sleep is not going to make that much of a difference. What will make a difference, if you consecutively acquire what’s called sleep debt. And sleep debt, it’s like if you keep removing money from your bank account and you’ve got more expenses that you have to pay than you have money for, that’s debt. And same thing happens with sleep debt.

And we’ve done in our research, we found that as sleep debt accumulates, people have a harder and harder time paying attention. So, if you’re looking at sleep debt accumulating over a week, you see people’s attention spans getting lower and lower over the course of the week. So, it’s really important not to let sleep debt accumulate.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I’d also like to get your view in terms of the amount of attention resources we have. We can’t do for 10 hours straight, like this is not possible even with whatever miracle supplement is being sold. Roughly, what is reasonable? If we are well-rested and we’re going to attend to something for as long as is reasonably humanly possible, what kind of time ranges are we talking about here?

Gloria Mark
So, I think two hours. If you can get two hours of focus at a stretch, that’s pretty good. That’s really good. It depends on a number of things. It depends how intrinsically motivated you are. If you’re really motivated in what you’re doing, you’ll be able to spend longer time. Time will seem like it’s flying by. If you’re less intrinsically motivated, it’s going to be more work for you to try to stay focused.

But think about two hours, but don’t despair. If you can only get 30 minutes of focus, that’s fine as long as you make sure you take a break, get yourself replenished, and then you can go back and try it in 30-minute segments. And so much of it depends on the nature of the work as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then by focusing, if there were an exercise, so we talked about the rest portion of this, sleep well, take breaks, watch when you’re sharpest in terms of attention based on your chrono type, are there any sort of exercises or practices we could do to bring us? If we’re on the 47-second world, what could bring us back to a two-and-a-half-minute world?

Gloria Mark
So, I practice what I call meta-awareness as an exercise. And this actually comes from mindfulness, which you’ve probably heard of, many of your listeners have heard of. During the pandemic, my university offered a course in mindfulness, and I find it very, very helpful for helping me relax, helping me fall asleep.

But I also realized that when I’m on my devices, I can also use a similar kind of technique. I’ve adapted it for the way we use our devices, which is learning to become aware of the present because that’s what mindfulness is about. It teaches you how to focus on the present.

So many of things we do when we’re on our devices are unconscious. So, I look at my phone and I have an urge to grab it, or I have this unconscious desire to switch to social media, or to switch to news. I’m a news junkie. I read a lot of news. Meta-awareness is probing yourself to become aware of these urges and to recognize them.

And so, I’ve learned to be able to recognize when I have this urge to switch screens, and I can reflect on it, and I can ask myself, “Why do I have this urge to go to social media?” It’s usually because I’m bored or because I’m procrastinating. And once I become aware of this urge, I can make this unconscious action conscious. I can bring it to my conscious attention. I can come up with a plan.

And my plan is usually of the form, “Gloria, spend 30 more minutes on this task and then you can be rewarded and go and check the news.” And so, learning to probe yourself is so valuable, and it’s really a way to gain mastery over your attention, and to be able to be intentional and to make decisions about where you want to be able to focus and for how long.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, then we become aware of the urge and the causes and make a plan. That’s great. Any other key interventions that are great for improving our attention span and abilities?

Gloria Mark
Yeah, another very valuable technique is to practice what’s called forethought. And forethought is imagining how your current actions will affect your future self. And what makes the most sense for me is to imagine how my current actions are going to affect myself later in the day, say, at 7:00 p.m. And if you’re a person who can easily spend 30 minutes to an hour on social media, or surfing the web, first, visualize your end of the day and where you want to be.

And I’m betting you want to feel rewarded and you want to feel peaceful, you want to feel fulfilled. And imagine yourself sitting on the couch, reading your favorite book, watching your favorite show, drinking a glass of wine. And the more concrete that visualization is, the more powerful of a tool it is to get you to stay on track in the present.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, if I may on the forethought. So, the approach there is to visualize ourselves in a future moment wherein we have successfully completed the things that we wanted to attend to. And so, it sounds like this isn’t so much your dramatic final victory, you’re being hoisted, or Gatorades being doused on you, but rather, “Hey, I finished this day and I accomplished the things I wanted to in this day, and I can feel a quiet pride satisfaction, kind of whatever flavor of goodness,” is there for you at the other end of the effort.

Gloria Mark
That’s right. And we shouldn’t undermine this experience at the end of the day because that’s pretty valuable. Having a day where you feel fulfilled and having the luxury of being able to relax at the end of the day, that’s quite powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. And you have another.

Gloria Mark
Yes. So, attention is goal-directed, and that’s something that a lot of people don’t realize. We pay attention according to what our goals are. So, if my goal is I want to finish writing an article, I’m going to be writing that article. That’s where my attention is. If my goal is I want to relieve boredom, then I’m probably going to be playing a game or going on social media. And so, it’s so important to stay aware of what our goals are.

I did research with colleagues at Microsoft Research, and they developed a very simple chatbot that asks people two very simple questions at the beginning of each day. The first question is, “What is your task-goal for the day? What do you want to accomplish today?” The second question was, “How do you want to feel by the end of the day?” So, that’s an emotional goal.

So, at the beginning of each day, people were reminded of their task-goal and their emotional goal. And the result was that people stayed on track more effectively after being asked those questions. But what we also discovered was that these effects don’t last very long. It might last one hour or a few hours. And the reason they don’t last so long is goals slip from our minds. They can slip so easily.

And so, what I’ve learned is that it’s really important to keep reinforcing our goals. So, whatever it takes, if you have to write goals on a Post-it Note and make sure it’s in your field of view, or put it on your phone where you can see that goal. So, don’t let our goals slip from our minds, is the message.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, you mentioned Microsoft and research, so I’ve got to ask you, the attention expert. I had read a study, I think it was done with Microsoft folks, and it said when they were distracted, they shifted their attention from one thing. It took them an average of 24 minutes to return to the thing they were doing. I’d love it if you could share. Is that true or accurate? Is there nuance to it? And is that just the way all of us have to be or can we shorten that?

Gloria Mark
So, first of all, there is something that’s not accurate. The study was not done at Microsoft Research, but the study was my study.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. We’re setting the record straight. Here we are, Gloria.

Gloria Mark
Yes, but you’d be surprised how factoids can change.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s do it.

Gloria Mark
Yeah. So, this was a study that I did, and this was with a graduate student of mine, Victor Gonzales, and this was done at various tech companies, so financial analysis companies, software companies. And it turns out that if you look at people’s attention spent on a task, not just on a screen, like you can switch screens very rapidly, every 47 seconds from email, to Word doc, to Excel, to Google Search.

But if you look at the level of a task, how long do people spend on any task? And granted, they might be switching their attention within that task. For example, I write papers for a living, and I might have my attention on a Word doc, and then I’m switching to read an article, and then I’m switching to look up something on the web, and I’m switching, switching, switching, but it’s all the same task.

So, we might ask, “Maybe it’s not so bad to be interrupted if your attention stays within the same framework of a single task.” Well, it turns out that if you’re interrupted from any particular task, there’s a pattern that we find in the data. And what happens is that people’s attention is then switched to another task.

They work on that, and then another, and then another. And then they start to work on a fourth task, and then go back and pick up the original interrupted task. That’s a 25 and a half-minute gap on average. People spend, on average, 10 and a half minutes on a task before switching to something else. That’s a big switch, to really switch to a completely different task.

Now, what happens? I was describing, they switch, and switch again, and switch again, and switch again. These are cognitive shifts in our minds. We’re not just shifting doing one single thing for 25 and a half minutes, and then coming back, but our attention keeps getting diverted. And so, let’s go back and think about that tank of mental resources, our limited precious mental resources.

They’re just draining because it requires effort to have to keep reorienting to these new tasks and trying to understand, “Okay, what am I doing now? Where did I leave off?” and so on. So, it’s a lot of effort that’s involved but it’s 25 and a half minutes on average to go back to an interrupted task.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so, during those 25 and a half minutes, they’re not just fiddling around on Facebook. They’re doing other tasks in the interim, yet there is a cost of that attention switching. And so, Gloria, can you share with us what is misrepresented when this research is shared in factoid format in popular media?

Gloria Mark
So, a lot of people, first of all, they’re not aware that we’re talking at the level of a task, so they tend to think of, I mean, we’re interrupted all the time. If I’m doing email, I can get interrupted, or I can get interrupted from Facebook, for that matter. But they tend to think that there’s just some single thing that’s going on but in between, and people are coming back to that original task, so there’s a lot of things.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. When, really, it’s a multi-step journey. Okay. And it sounds like that is what we observe but it certainly doesn’t have to be the norm. If I’m, say, working in a home office, I get a knock on the door from my wife, she says, “Can you take care of the spider or this very heavy thing?” it is entirely possible for me to do the thing, return within two minutes, and return to my task in far less than 25 and a half minutes, but I have utilized some of my attention resource tank in executing those switches.

Gloria Mark
That’s right, yeah. And, of course, if it’s a minor interruption, like taking care of a spider, assuming you’re not afraid of spiders, then you should be able to come right back and pick up your task without too much of an effort.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, as I’m thinking about that scenario, I’ll tell you, this is a quirk of me. I don’t know, I think I’m also easily hypnotized. I remember the stage hypnotist in college picked me out probably for a reason. And sometimes I’ll get really kind of mesmerized in the work I’m doing, and it’s really fun. It’s a groove and a flow, and I’m thinking about, “The implication of this, but what about that? But then what about this?” like several layers of implication, cause and effect.

And, Gloria, do you know if this, in the attention research literature, is this a personality domain that people can vary on? And does it mean anything? Or, is this just some whole another thing I got going on?

Gloria Mark
There are individual differences in people’s ability to be engaged in something. And, yes, some people can be…it’s more easy for them to get deeply absorbed in something than others. There’s actually a test you can do.
So, there is a scale that you can use, it’s called the Tellegen Absorption Scale. And this has been shown to measure traits of absorption. And some people have this uncanny ability to be very deeply absorbed in things. For example, when people read mystery, some people can become so absorbed in reading the mystery that they actually hear the footsteps on the stairs. They can visualize the imagery a lot better than others. So, you might be one of these individuals who scores at the extremes on the Tellegen Absorption Scale.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Gloria, tell us, are there any other key tools, tactics, interventions, things people who want to be awesome at their job should know or do to improve their ability to pay attention?

Gloria Mark
Yeah. So, it’s about how you plan your day. So, most of us, we’ve been brought up with the idea that you create a schedule for your day, and most people will write down the tasks that they have to do, and they’ll assign a time to doing it. That’s the way most of us, it’s how we’ve been brought up. It’s what we do. But I’d like to turn that around and talk about designing your day.

So, rather than scheduling tasks with a time, think back to when I was talking about that people have natural rhythms of attention. There are certain times of the day when people are at their peak focus, and other times when they’re in valleys, their focus is not great. Think about your unique times of peak focus and design your day so that you’d leverage those times to do tasks that are the hardest, that require the most creativity because you will do your best.

So, rather than creating these artificial schedules that ignore our attentional capacities, think instead of your personal rhythm and when you function best. And so, if I have, say, to work on a paper, I might plan the times to work on the paper for mid-morning for me, mid-afternoon for me, and then, of course, I have other things to do. I have to write emails, do what I call subordinate work, filling out forms, things like that. I will do those when I have these valleys of attention because it doesn’t require that much effort.

So, design your day, and also design your day with what I call empty space. There is a Japanese expression that’s called “yohaku no bi” which refers to the beauty of empty space. And I came up with this idea from when I was an artist. Because when I was an artist, I learned about the concept of negative space. It’s this space that surrounds a figure, and it’s as important as the figure itself. It’s what makes the figure shine. It’s what makes it vibrant and gives it energy.

And when you design your day, make sure you design empty space into your day, time that you can use for contemplation, meditation, for going for a walk, doing rote activity. And rote activity could be things like knitting. Some person talked about how he loves to just throw a ball against the screen. That serves to relax him and helps him de-stress. There’s a lot of things you can do during that time of empty space.

And think about what helps you the most. What I like to do is I do exercise, and I love to go outside and do exercise during that time. It really helps replenish me. So, yeah, don’t pack your day but give your work a chance to breathe so that you can really come back and do your best.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Gloria, now I’d love to hear about your favorite things. Could you share a favorite quote with us?

Gloria Mark
Well, I actually have two favorite quotes, and it’s really hard for me to decide which one I like better, so I’ll share both. The first one is by Louis Pasteur, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” And I love that quote. It’s something that’s just benefited me in my whole life. If you have radar for opportunities, and an opportunity comes along, you can pounce on it and grab it.

The second quote comes from an art teacher of mine, and it’s “To have the courage to fail.” And I love this quote because so much of the time we do things that are safe, and we know that they’ll be successful because they’re safe. We’re not taking risks. But if you can have the courage to take that risk, knowing that it’s likely that you will fail, you have the chance to make a great discovery. So, that’s why I like those.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study?

Gloria Mark
Yeah, there is a study done by French scientists, where they had people do hard tasks over a six-hour period. And most of the times when people go into laboratory studies, they’ll do a task for an hour, and they’ll do a hard task and then they’ll take some measurement of how stressed they are or how many hours they made. This was done over six hours.

And what these researchers found was that as people got more exhausted, they became more easily distracted. And so, they were asked questions periodically, “Would you rather have a monetary reward now or would you rather wait, and then you can get even a higher reward? So, take $10 now, if you wait 30 minutes, we’ll give you $15.”

Over the course of the day doing hard tasks for a six-hour period, people became less and less likely to delay gratification and more likely to just grab that money at the time. So, they lost the ability of self-control. And when you lose the ability of self-control, that’s when we become more distracted.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Gloria Mark
I always go back to Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. It’s such a powerful book, and it just shows how, if people have purpose, if people have goals, that can really help us perform best in our lives. And it’s just a very powerful message.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Gloria Mark
Well, the idea of probing myself is a tool that I’ve learned to constantly probe myself, to ask myself, “Do I feel exhausted? Is it time for a break? Why do I have an urge to switch my attention?” And it’s become second nature, it’s like a muscle that I’ve developed. And I find it to be a very important tool, and it’s very powerful, and it’s very effective for keeping me on task.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Gloria Mark
It’s the idea that we have limited attentional resources, and people don’t realize that. People realize that our attention is infinite, we can do so many things, and not worry about consequences. We do have limited mental attentional resources, and we have to pick and choose what we pay attention to.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Gloria Mark
Well, you could go to my website www.GloriaMark.com. Everything that I spoke about today in the episode, you can find in my book. It’s called Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. And this describes my 20-plus years of research into studying attention with our devices. You can also find me on Twitter @GloriaMark_PhD and also on LinkedIn.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Gloria Mark
Final call to action is to gain agency over your attention. So, be a master of your tools, your computers, phones, tablets. Don’t let your tools be the master over you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Gloria, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck and pleasant attention.

Gloria Mark
Thank you so much for having me.