The good news is you have more control over your mind than you think - and there’s no need to throw away your smartphone at all. Knowledge workers - those whose work typically involves a lot of “thinking” like engineers, designers, and architects - then could focus two and a half minutes on a task before switching.īy 2012, that figure had dropped to 75 seconds. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in her new book, “Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity.”Ĭonsider also the experiment Mark did in 2004. “Our attention spans while on our computers and smartphones have become short - crazily short - as we now spend about 47 seconds on any screen on average,” Dr. Thanks to these, our attention span is fast dwindling. It’s always on and always enticing us with more TikToks, more emails and more online shops. So much so that people working from home say that they spend up to two hours a day on social media.īut the chief executive distractor of our times is the smartphone. Thirteen years later, and we only have better smartphones and more addictive social media to distract us even more. In fact, they do it nearly half the time - or 47% according to a 2010 Harvard study. The problem with our minds is that they like to wander. Source: AFP Why it’s so hard to find focus
