Finding Focus

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Many years ago, when Gloria Mark was visiting family in Austria, she found it difficult to get a reliable internet connection.

GLORIA MARK: My mother-in-law, who lived in a very small Austrian town, she didn't have Wi-Fi, and I couldn't stay away from internet that long. And so what I did one day was walk around the neighborhood with my laptop open, looking at the bars on my computer to see when I might find a hotspot.

And sure enough, I did find one, and I sat down on the edge of the front lawn of a house, and I was doing my email.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: In a little while, Gloria looked up to see she had company.

GLORIA MARK: Two elderly gentlemen came out of the house.

GLORIA MARK: They brought lawn chairs, and they sat down right in front of me. And they didn't say a word, and I didn't say anything to them. And I just wanted to get through my email. That was my goal. And I was certain they were going to ask me to leave, and they did not look very friendly, so I didn't think it was going to be a friendly ask. And they just kept watching me.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Gloria tried to think of a way to explain herself across the language barrier.

GLORIA MARK: After a while, I pointed to myself, and I said, California. And all of a sudden, they started laughing, and they said Schwarzenegger, because at the time, their Austrian son, actor-turned-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, was the governor of California. And then I knew I had their approval, and I could continue sitting there, and I was able to finish my email.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Those were innocent times. In a few years, Gloria was to discover the opposite problem. SHANKAR VEDANTAM: The Internet wasn't difficult to access. It was difficult to escape.

With the advent of smartphones, we now get our email, news feeds, and social media 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It can be difficult nowadays to have a conversation with someone without being constantly interrupted by text messages, email alerts, and other notifications.

This week on Hidden Brain, we examine the effects of being constantly online on our minds, our growing tendency to be distracted, and ways to recapture our focus and attention.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Whether it's the laptop on our desks, the cell phones in our hands, or the smart watches on our wrists, we spend a lot of our lives looking at screens. Technology has made it possible for us to do remarkable things.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: We can stay in touch with friends and family who are hundreds of miles away and collaborate with colleagues who live in other states and countries. But what are the effects of all the screen time on our minds?

At the University of California Irvine, psychologist Gloria Mark studies how our capacity for focus is changing and how we can achieve greater harmony as we deal with many competing demands on our attention.

Gloria Mark, welcome to Hidden Brain.

GLORIA MARK: Thank you so much for having me.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Gloria, at the start of your career, you spent time working in Germany. I understand that lunch was an important part of your workday. What happened at lunchtime?

GLORIA MARK: That's right. In Germany, the main meal of the day occurs at lunchtime. And it's called Mittagessen.

So the typical practice was for one colleague to walk around close to noon, gather up people, and then we would all go as a group to lunch. We would have our nice, long, warm meal. We would have conversations. Sometimes we would gossip. And even though we might have been talking about things very different than our project at hand, I would say these conversations got the wheels of our minds churning and boosted our creativity.

GLORIA MARK: Plus, it helped us bond with our colleagues.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Gloria left Germany in 2000 to join the faculty at the University of California, Irvine. One of the first things she noticed in her new job was the difference at lunchtime.

GLORIA MARK: So, you know, when I came back to the US, I had a heavy teaching load as an assistant professor, and I had meetings, and I had a lot of different work. Lunch was pretty much a break between classes to run to the cafeteria, grab takeaway food, and then I would race back to my office, would go down a long hallway, and all my colleagues had their doors open, and as I was racing down the hallway, I would look in at their different offices, see them sitting in front of their computers, eating their sandwiches, and then I would slide into my office in front of my computer and do exactly the same thing.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: It wasn't just about lunch.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Gloria found herself constantly sprinting from one thing to the next.

GLORIA MARK: There were so many things that changed when I came back to the US. I had classes I had to teach. I had multiple research projects, had to write grants, sit on committees, meet with students. I had to do service work. There were so many different things, and I just found my attention being yanked from one thing to another, and it was very hard for me to stay focused on any one thing.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You once found yourself double-booked at two teleconferences at the same time. Tell me the story of what happened.

GLORIA MARK: Both of them were very important, and I was too embarrassed to cancel either one of those conferences. So what I did is I sat there, and I happened to be in a restaurant, because I remember there was a lot of background noise, and I had one earbud for one conference plugged into my computer and into my right ear, and then the other earbud was plugged into my phone and then into my left ear. And I was trying to pay attention to both of these conferences, and every so often, my name would be called. And every time I would hear my name called, there's something called the cocktail party phenomenon, that if you hear your name, all of a sudden you attend to it, so I was being asked to respond to something.

And of course, I couldn't hear what they were asking, and especially with the background noise in the restaurant made it really difficult. And so I would cringe, and I have to ask them to repeat the question.

And then I would put the other earbud back in my ear and go back to trying to shift my attention back and forth to each of these conferences. And of course, my performance was terrible. I didn't do well in either one of these conferences.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: There was another time you were at a conference and a colleague of yours had his computer networked to the main display. And it gave you and everyone else a window into how many of us interact with our devices. Paint me a picture of what happened, Gloria.

GLORIA MARK: Yeah, so this was what's called a program committee meeting. And this is where a group of people come together, discuss papers that have been reviewed, and the committee makes a decision as to which papers should be accepted and which ones not. So for everyone to keep track of the list of papers, one person's computer is networked to a large public display. So everyone can see this list of papers as we go through them.

This person whose computer was plugged into the display kept checking his email. So he kept changing the display, check his email. My guess is that it was so habitual for him to check his email that he probably just forgot that his computer was on public view for everyone to see.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So in 2009, you got what you say was a wake-up call. What happened? What was this wake-up call?

GLORIA MARK: I received a diagnosis of stage three colon cancer. And it was shocking because I thought I was the healthiest person I knew. I jogged, I ate healthy, I kept my weight down. But suddenly, I was told that I had a 69% five-year survival rate. This was shocking. But I was very determined to be in that 69% group. And I'm very happy to say that I was in that group and have been cancer-free since. But the cause of the cancer was not known. As many causes of cancer are just not known. They couldn't find anything genetic to explain it. But I can say that the years leading up to that diagnosis, I was undergoing just a tremendous amount of stress. And I remember at the time, I kept thinking I'm going to pay the price for all this stress.

Now, I can't attribute my cancer diagnosis directly to stress, and I can't attribute it directly to screen time. But I can say that this cancer diagnosis was a wake up call for me. And it made me realize that time is finite, and being stressed is just not a good way for us to be spending our time living our life.



GLORIA MARK: And so this health scare just made me very deeply aware that we need to rethink how we use our devices and how we need to really control our stress so that we can really focus on health and well being. That's the most important thing.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: When we come back, why paying sustained attention is so valuable and so difficult? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I’m Shankar Vedantam.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Gloria Mark is a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine. She studies how we pay attention and when we get distracted.

Gloria, you once heard an unusual story from your doctor about his desperate efforts to battle the distractions of the internet. What did he tell you?

GLORIA MARK: My doctor knew about my research, and so he volunteered to me that when he had to write a grant, he would book himself a round trip ticket from California to Washington, DC. Now, why did he do this? And he said, because on an airplane, you don't have Wi-Fi. At least you can, you have the opportunity to not have Wi-Fi. And I said to him, but on an airplane, there are so many other kinds of distractions.

GLORIA MARK: People are talking and walking by and babies are crying. And he said, no, no, those don't distract me. It's the internet. And I said, isn't it easier to just stay at home and turn off the internet? And he said, he can't. He actually had to physically change his environment to prevent himself from getting on the internet.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Was the doctor who told you the story an aberration? Have you heard sort of similar things from other people, Gloria?

GLORIA MARK: Yes, and so every so often, I'll get emails from people who tell me about the difficulties they have with distractions. And one email in particular really struck me as very characteristic. This person wrote, trying to articulate the difficulty with workplace distractions is like chasing a greased pig.

GLORIA MARK: I feel like every day my work is to deftly navigate the complexities of this job with the accuracy while being bombarded with emails, personal appearances by fellow coworkers, phone calls and texts. I leave work drained, not physically, but mentally. I detest these devices that I think we are all slaves to.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: To get a grasp on the extent of the problem of workplace distractions, Gloria and her colleagues began to track people as they sat before their computers at work.

GLORIA MARK: I am trained in psychology, and typically what psychologists do is they bring people into a laboratory, and they will create an artificial model of the world so that you can focus on a particular variable to measure.

GLORIA MARK: But our use of devices, our computers, our phones, it's so embedded in our lives that it's really hard to separate the rest of people's lives from their use of their devices.

GLORIA MARK: So I thought it was more important to go where people are.

GLORIA MARK: And so I created what I called living laboratories so that I could study people's use of their devices in their natural environments. And to do this, we originally started out shadowing people with stopwatches. So every time people switched their screen, we would click stop time, note the time, start time for the new screen or the new activity. And then around 2011, we started using software logging.

GLORIA MARK: So we could look at people's screens switching unobtrusively and automatically without having someone behind them, shadowing them.

GLORIA MARK: And we also would have people wear heart rate monitors, which gives a measure of what's called heart rate variability, which is a measure of stress.

GLORIA MARK: We would also have people answer very short question, which gives their subjective perception about what they're experiencing.

GLORIA MARK: And what you do is you put all of these different measures together in time, so that at any point in time, you have a pretty comprehensive idea of what people are experiencing as they're using their devices.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I'm wondering what you've observed in your many hours of observation as you watch people at work.

What do you pick up, Gloria?

GLORIA MARK: So one of the things we've observed, and I've been doing this for about 20 years, is that the amount of attention duration on any one screen has decreased over time. So when we first started studying this back in 2004, we found that people's average attention on any screen was about two and a half minutes.

GLORIA MARK: And then in 2012, this went down to about 75 seconds, on average, and then from about 2016 through 2020, this was like right before the pandemic started, we found the average attention to be 47 seconds.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So it was diminishing over time?

GLORIA MARK: It was diminishing over time, and others have replicated it. So people found 44 seconds, 50 seconds, we found 47 seconds, but the average of all these studies comes to 47 seconds on average.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Are you taking into account that people might be on the same screen but switching between apps? So in other words, they're on one screen, but they're in fact doing many different things on that one screen.

GLORIA MARK: That's exactly what we are measuring. So the idea is that whatever window is in the foreground is what people are paying attention to. So even though a person is just on one computer screen, if you're clicking on email, it's the email application that appears on your screen. If you click to work on a Word document, it's the Word document that appears on your screen. If you click to social media, it's the social media.

GLORIA MARK: So that's what we're measuring, is the amount of time that people are spending on these different screens as the screens are switching.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: There are other intersecting lines of evidence that suggest our capacity for sustained attention is diminishing. One interesting piece of evidence comes from another type of screen that we watch incessantly, our TV screens.

GLORIA MARK: Yeah, when TV and film first started out, shot lengths were much longer than they are now. And shot lengths have also decreased over time, and they now average about four seconds.

GLORIA MARK: Now, a way to see this very clearly is to look at your TV and turn the volume completely down. And then you really notice the fast shot changes. If you watch a blockbuster film like The Transformers, shot lengths change about every two seconds or so. So, film editors and directors design these fast shot lengths to keep us engaged in these films. The idea is that if they're changing rapidly, we're not going to get bored.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And I'm wondering if the relationship here is bidirectional with what's happening inside our minds. In other words, we actually have shorter attention spans, and so the movies and television shows are catering to that. But the fact that movies and television shows now have so many shot changes also changes how our minds are working.

GLORIA MARK: I do think it's bidirectional. We can't say what is causing what. And it could also be that film editors and film directors are influenced by their own short attention spans. And so they're designing these short shot lengths based on what they perceive to be interesting.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: In the workplace, Gloria finds that instead of focusing on one thing at a time, people rapidly cycle between activities. But much of this activity has a circular feel to it. Like restless animals pacing in a cage, many of us return incessantly to the same apps over and over with not much to show for it.

GLORIA MARK: We found that people check e-mail on average 77 times a day. These were information workers. We measured them during the workday. The previous study we had done a couple of years earlier, we found 74 times a day on average.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And that's on average, which means that some people might be even more than 77 times a day.

GLORIA MARK: Yes, one person on our sample checked over 400 times a day.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So when I'm working, I often tell myself I'm working on something, but then I say I'll attend to some other thing for just a second. I tell myself it'll only be a second.

But then as I'm attending to the new thing, something else pops up, and I tell myself I look at that for just a second. Now I'm on task number three. Can you talk about the idea of nested interruptions and how long it takes people to return to their original tasks?

GLORIA MARK: Yes, that's a really interesting thing that we noticed, is that people generally think you're interrupted and then you go right back to the task that you were interrupted from. But that's not the typical pattern of behavior. The typical pattern is that a person is interrupted, and then they're interrupted from that interruption, and then they're interrupted again. And then they go back to the original task. That's the general pattern of behavior.

GLORIA MARK: We find that people average about 10 and a half minutes working in a project before they're interrupted and moved to something else. Keep in mind, within each project, there's lots of switching. So the difficulty is that when you're interrupted, it's not just a single interruption. But you're continually being interrupted again and again. And so it's really hard to go back and reorient to the original task.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Does the data tell us how long it takes us on average to get back to task number one?

GLORIA MARK: It takes, on average, about 25 and a half minutes.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Wow. So those interruptions are not just, I'll check something for one second. It never is a second.

GLORIA MARK: It's never a second.

GLORIA MARK: Remember, we're talking about looking at the level of a project. You're working on a project, interrupted from that, moving to another project, and to another project, starting to work on another project, and then going back.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So, many of us complain about getting distracted by others, by bosses, by friends, by coworkers. But you found that we have become so conditioned to expect frequent distractions, that if the outside world doesn't interrupt us, we just interrupt ourselves?

GLORIA MARK: This was one of the most surprising things that we found in our research. Going back to when we were shadowing people and observing them, for no apparent reason, someone would suddenly stop in the middle of say, working on a word document, and then they would check email, or they would pick up their phone. And there was no external stimulus. That was triggering them to make that switch. There was something inside themselves. And, you know, I've thought about this quite a bit, and I realize for myself, how often I self-interrupt. And, you know, I might have an urge to do something. And we've asked people, why do you self-interrupt?

GLORIA MARK: Well, because people have memories of something they forgot to do, or they're cued to some information in the current task to do something else. So there's lots of reasons, or because they're bored, and then their attention wanders.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: What I'm almost hearing, Gloria, is that we have something of an internal clock in our heads. And after we've worked on something for a little while, we're so used to getting interrupted, so used to switching between tasks, that that little clock goes off, and the alarm goes off, and we say, okay, I've been working at this thing for five minutes. Surely I must have to do something else right now. Since there's nothing else that's actually interrupting us, we go ahead and do it ourselves.

GLORIA MARK: So what we found in our data was we looked at the number of interruptions that come from some external trigger, like a notification or a phone call. And then we also looked at the number of interruptions that come from within a person, right? People self-interrupt. And we find that when the number of external interruptions goes down in the next hour, the number of self-interruptions goes up. So it's almost as if people want to maintain this level of interruptions. And if you're not being interrupted by something external to yourself, then you self-interrupt.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Can you remember a time when you interrupted yourself, Gloria?

GLORIA MARK: Oh, I interrupt myself all the time. It's very common. So I was reading an article about AI, and for some reason, the thought popped into my head, how safe is it to eat non-organic strawberries? It's just a completely random thought. And I simply had to look it up.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Of course.

GLORIA MARK: So I self-interrupted, went on the internet, and looked up to see whether it was safe or not.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So you read up on strawberries and pesticides, and I'm guessing there were probably other rabbit holes that you went down from there.

GLORIA MARK: Oh, for sure, because then, of course, I started thinking about other fruits and vegetables.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Gloria says that a central driver of our increasing levels of distractedness is that the human brain, which has a finite capacity for attention, is finding itself in a losing battle with the avalanche of information and options on the internet and social media.

GLORIA MARK: I mean, we live in an age where we have access to more information and more people than ever before in history. But ultimately, the mind is a bottleneck. The human mind can't process all that information.

GLORIA MARK: So, when we have so many friends on, say, Facebook or other social media, it's just not possible to have any kind of meaningful relationship with so many people. And there's something called the Dunbar number. Robin Dunbar is a British psychologist, and he found that people realistically can have about five meaningful relationships. And they can have about 150 other relationships, which may not be very close or meaningful, but at least you can say that this is a friend. But on social media, because it scales up so high, it's just not possible to conceive of having meaningful relationships with so many people.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Let's talk a moment about multitasking. We all know it can be difficult to do two things at once, but you also say that they can be hidden costs to switching between activities. You described these costs using the metaphor of a whiteboard. Describe this metaphor for me, Gloria.

GLORIA MARK: So, every time we switch our attention, going from one task to another, you can think of it as having a whiteboard in your mind, an internal whiteboard. And so, just like with a real whiteboard, when you write information on that whiteboard, and then you erase it, sometimes you can't erase it completely, and sometimes there's a residue. And the same thing happens with our minds. So, let's say I'm reading the news, and I read about some horrific story. That creates a residue. So even though I'm switching, and I'm in a completely different task, the residue from that news article stays with me, and it creates interference for my current task at hand. So, it's very difficult when we do this attention switching. It's hard to make a clean break, right? There's generally gonna be some kind of interference from previous tasks.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So, Gloria, you've studied the effects of these distractions on our propensity to make errors, and specifically, you've looked at the domain of healthcare. What do you find?

GLORIA MARK: So, first of all, let me say that there have been decades of studies in the laboratory that show that when people multitask, they make more errors. There was a study done of physicians. The researchers shadowed physicians in their real work environments, and they noted down every time physicians were interrupted and were multitasking. And as you can imagine, physicians are interrupted quite frequently by other people, by devices, by beepers. And it turns out that the more times that physicians multitasked and were interrupted, the more errors they made in prescriptions.

GLORIA MARK: And some of these errors were quite serious in terms of writing down wrong medications and wrong dosages. So when people's attention is diverted from what they're doing, it's very easy to make errors.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: We live in a world saturated with distractions. Imagining that we can cut ourselves off from these distractions can be appealing, but is often not realistic. We need to be able to respond to emergencies, work collaboratively with colleagues, and allow ourselves to learn from the inexhaustible knowledge that is available on the Internet.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: When we come back, how to find focus in a world filled with distractions? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Gloria Mark studies the psychology of attention. She's the author of Attention Span, a groundbreaking way to restore balance, happiness and productivity. She says the first step to fighting distraction is to notice it.

GLORIA MARK: I realized that, you know, when we use our devices, so many of the things we do are unconscious. So I see my phone next to me, and I have this automatic reaction to grab it and swipe it open. Or I might have an automatic reaction to click on a notification or to self-interrupt and turn to social media. And so I learned to ask myself, why do I have this urge to go to social media? Why do I have this urge to check my email right now? And so what this meta-awareness does is that it's raising unconscious activities to a more conscious level. And when we can become more conscious of them, we can be more intentional and we can create plans.

GLORIA MARK: For example, if I have an urge to go to social media and I become aware that I'm about to switch, I can say, okay, Gloria, I'm gonna work 20 more minutes and then I can reward myself with a break.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I understand that you use this technique as you were writing your book.

GLORIA MARK: Yes, I'm a news junkie. And there was a trial of a very well-known personality. And I knew that the results of the trial were gonna be broadcast at any moment. And I did see a notification on my screen that announced that the trial results were going to be announced. And rather than click on it, which I knew would distract me for quite a long time, I probed myself and said, do I really need to look at that right now? And the answer is no. So I continued working, and then I was able to look at the results when I took a break.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: In other words, once you're actually sort of trying to, you're making the choice deliberately, in some ways the choice becomes easier to forego because you can say, do I actually want to make the choice? So much of this is happening because it's happening unthinkingly.

GLORIA MARK: That's right, yes. So you become more in control of your actions.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: A second way that you have recommended to push back against distractions is to practice something that you call forethought by imagining the state you'll be in in the very near future. Can you tell me how you use forethought to avoid getting distracted?

GLORIA MARK: So forethought is about imagining our future selves and how we want our future selves to be. And I think it makes the most sense to think of our future selves at the end of a workday. And so I ask myself, what do I want to do at the end of the day? How do I want to feel?

GLORIA MARK: So I want to see myself relaxing, maybe watching my favorite show, being with family or friends. How do I want to feel? I want to feel rewarded and fulfilled. And the more concrete of a visualization you can form about your future self at the end of the day, the more powerful it is to keep you in check and keep you on task.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: In other words, our goals are one way to hold off distractions. The clearer our goals are in our heads, the easier it becomes to say, I don't want to go down this side alley because it's going to keep me from getting to my goal.

GLORIA MARK: Exactly. And it's about making your goals very concrete, creating a visualization of these goals. And don't forget, it's not just about thinking of finishing the task, but it's also about thinking how you will feel emotionally. You'll feel relaxed. You'll feel relieved.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I understand that you're a fan of the online game Pangram. Tell me about this game, Gloria, and how it speaks to the issue of distraction and destructibility.

GLORIA MARK: Pangram is a very easy and engaging game making anagrams, and you reach different levels. And it's a way to help relax my mind. Now, of course, I can get stuck in this game, and I don't want to be playing this for, you know, long periods of time, but it's okay to play it for a few hours, a few minutes, especially if I just had, you know, a very difficult meeting, or, you know, I just need to clear my head from having done a lot of work. It's okay to spend a few minutes doing something easy, mindless, rote to help relax yourself. But the key thing is that you have to make sure that it really is a short period of time.

GLORIA MARK: So you may want to set a timer, or you may want to create what I call a hook, which is you do this rote activity five minutes before you have a meeting, and you know you've got to be at that meeting, and that's going to pull you out. Some people talk about doing knitting as a rote activity. One person told me he has this ball that he throws on a screen in his office, and that's his rote activity.

GLORIA MARK: The great writer Maya Angelou talked about her big mind and her little mind, and her big mind was used for her deep thought, for doing her writing. And then every so often she'd break away, and she'd use her little mind, which is when she would do crossword puzzles or other kinds of simple activities, and she did that to relax and clear her head.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I love that story because what it says is that, in fact, we have these different needs in our minds, and it's not a problem that we have a need for distraction or a need for rote activity.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: The problem arises when those activities carry us away, and then we are down rabbit holes, and we forget the needs of, you know, what Maya Angelou would call our big mind.

GLORIA MARK: Yes, there is nothing wrong with doing some simple, simple mindless game like Pangram as long as you put a limit on it.

GLORIA MARK: And as long as you know, you know, there's a purpose to it. The purpose is to help you relax, clear your head, so that you can go back and do other things that are really important to do.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Another technique that you recommend is that people check their email only twice a day. Do you do this yourself?

GLORIA MARK: Not as often as I should, but it is something that when I do it, it's very valuable. I'm a fan of batching email. You know, you check your email first thing in the morning, and then you check it midday, maybe after lunch, and then at the end of the day. So twice a day is good as well. One thing that I discovered is that email ages very fast. So you might get the most urgent email that's sent to you first thing in the morning. And if you don't deal with it until the end of the day, you might discover, oh, the problem has already been solved. Or, you know, the person writes back and said, ah, I got the information that I need.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: At the same time, Gloria, when you don't respond to a question that let's say a coworker is asking you, at least some of the time, what happens is that someone else might end up responding to it. So I certainly get the appeal of not wanting to be distracted. But surely in collaborative work environments, our desire to not be distracted can mean we are implicitly asking others to pick up the slack?

GLORIA MARK: That's very true. Here's the thing. The burden is placed on the email recipient, right? The sender is the one who benefits, but it's always the recipient who has to do the extra work. And I completely agree with you that we all need to be good citizens and do our part, especially if we're doing collaborative work.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: How much of what you're recommending is sort of about individuals, and how much of it is about the structures and organizations in which individuals are embedded? Because when you came back from Germany to the United States, you came back to a very different kind of job, and someone could say, look, you had a job in Germany that allowed you to focus on one or two projects. You just have a different job right now.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And yes, of course, you might wish that the new job had the same level of distractedness, which is very little distractedness, as your earlier job, but this is just a different job.

GLORIA MARK: That's right. It is a different job. I do think that organizations bear some responsibility for helping people focus. So some organizations institute a quiet time during the day, usually two or three hours during the day, where no electronic communications are sent, and people are off the hook from having to answer electronic communications.

GLORIA MARK: And what this does is it helps reset expectations, because email has its own set of norms, as does Slack, as does texting, that when you get these messages, you have to respond fast. And so the burden cannot just be on the individual to pull out, but there really has to be a collective solution that I believe organizations need to be responsible for.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: One of the ideas that you have proposed, Gloria, is that we all have fluctuations in our capacity for attention during the day.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Talk about the idea of these attention rhythms and how we can take advantage of them.

GLORIA MARK: When most people think of attention, they think of there being two states, you're focused or unfocused.

GLORIA MARK: And as I've been studying attention, it occurred to me that there's another variable in the mix that's really important, and that is how much mental effort is involved when you're paying attention. So there's things we do that can be very challenging, like trying to read a difficult article. And there's things we do that are very easy, like playing solitaire or playing a pangram game. So we did a research study where we asked people questions throughout the day.

GLORIA MARK: And people had to simply respond, how engaged were you in the thing you were just doing, and how challenged were you in the thing you were just doing? And so people responded, we had time stamps, and we could track their responses over the course of the day.

GLORIA MARK: Turns out that when we look at the focused state of attention, being challenged and engaged, we see a peak rhythm, which is around mid-morning for most people, and again about mid-afternoon for most people. There are individual differences, of course, but we do see that there are these peaks and valleys, so to speak, of attention throughout the day.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: How do we take advantage of that? So if we have a number of tasks during the day and we know that we have these rhythms of attention, how should we marry the levels of our attention with the tasks that we have to accomplish?

GLORIA MARK: Think about what your peak focus times are, and think about planning to do those tasks that require the hardest work, the most thought, the most creative thinking during those times when your attention is at its peak. And for the times when our attention is in a valley, that's when I do what I call subordinate work, work that doesn't involve a lot of thought, but simple work that needs to get done.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: There is one final idea on how we can fight distractions, and it is counterintuitive. Gloria says we can increase our capacity for focus if we consciously take breaks from the things we are focusing on.

GLORIA MARK: There is a Japanese expression that's called Yōhaku no Bi, which means the beauty of empty space. And there is a very well-known Japanese garden in Kyoto, which has the most beautiful rocks that are very carefully positioned. And what is as important as the rocks themselves is the space around the rocks, because that space creates a kind of dynamism that makes these rocks more beautiful. And we can use that as a metaphor to think about our work day.

GLORIA MARK: So, you know, of course, we want to perform the best that we possibly can. But we also have to design empty space into our day to enable our work to shine, because otherwise we just get exhausted. And what can you do during this empty space? Take a walk. Go out in nature. That's the best break of all. You can meditate. You can contemplate. There's many different ways to help your mind refresh.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I understand that you used to be a painter before you were an academic. And when you're a painter, of course, you have to pay attention not just to what you're putting down on the canvas, but the parts of the canvas that you are not painting.

GLORIA MARK: That's how I came to think about this idea of empty space, or in painting, it's called negative space, where you have to really pay attention to the space around the figure and give that importance, too. So it's a holistic understanding of the painting. And that's how we have to think about our workday in a holistic sense. It's not just the time we do our work, but it's also the time that we devote to replenishing ourselves.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Gloria Mark is a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine. She's the author of Attention Span, A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. Gloria, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

GLORIA MARK: Oh, thank you so much for having me.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quarell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. I’m Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.