Here’s a challenge, particularly for those of you reading this column online. Can you get to the end of this piece without getting distracted?
That might not sound like a big challenge, but you might be surprised how few people can do so (and not just because I’m such a lousy writer that I can’t hold your attention).
This week, I’ve been reading a fascinating new book called Attention Span by leading Informatics professor (me neither) Gloria Mark.
In the book, Mark digs deep into the research of how our attention span has changed over the years, and the results are quite striking.
Back in 2004, Mark ran a survey which suggested that the typical duration of attention on a screen by office workers was two and a half minutes before they switched their attention to another screen.
By 2012, that figure was down to seventy-seconds – half the attention span of eight years earlier.
By 2021, this number had shrunk to under a minute – it took just forty-four seconds before they were distracted.
To give a sense of how long that is, the average person reads around 238 words a minute. We’re about 200 words into this article (it just feels longer), which means if you’re still here, you’ve already outlasted the average reader, who has already switched off.
To be fair, those technological distractions are ever more enticing – who can resist a ping or a beep on your phone to find out who has messaged you?
The rise of communication grows unabated: another statistic from Gloria Mark’s book is the increasing amount of time we spend on email, almost doubling from forty-seven to eighty-three minutes a day between 2008 and 2016.
In one study, office workers checked their emails on average seventy-seven times a day, with one doing so 374 times.
Each interruption has an increasingly detrimental effect on work: rather than immediately returning to the job in hand, people took an average of 25 minutes to do so.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising, but with this increasing glut of messages, office work has become increasingly sedentary.
Back in the 1980s, office workers would spend only a third of their day sat behind their desk: today that figure is 90 per cent.
This isn’t just a work issue. College students are warming up for employment with the amount of time they spend checking social media – on average, 118 time a day.
While technology is wonderful in all kinds of ways it is increasingly a time suck if you’re not careful.
It sounds crazy, but as well as paying for my Internet, I now also pay for a programme that blocks the Internet from my computer when I’m trying to write.
The programme’s name? Freedom.
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