How to regain control of your attention in the age of distraction

On Attention Span

As a product manager, I work across multiple departments in the company I work for right now. I also have to juggle on various projects at the same time, answering emails, writing docs, doing research, joining multiple calls, and aligning numerous stakeholders every day. Not to mention some random dudes on Slack asking me about random shit.

Over time, it is such a tiring experience because it costs me my productivity and attention level, eventually making me feel more fatigue and stressed throughout the day. This is how modern work feels nowadays. But does it have to be this way? Can we do something about it? A lot of things need to be unpacked here.

A study from the University of California, Irvine concluded that:

After only 20 minutes of repeating interruptions, people reported significantly higher stress, frustration, workload, effort, and pressure.

Repeating interruption results in context-switching. We do context-switching more often than ever. It is not going to do any good for well-being. Context-switching is an action of shifting our attention between different tasks, apps, or projects. It harms our work, making us less productive and more stressed. Data also states that it takes another 25 minutes to return focus to a task after interruption. I am mind blown by it.

Context-switching is driven by the rising demands of our attention by multiple smartphone and laptop apps, such as email, phone calls, hangout, zoom, slack, project-management tools, etc. Workers feel a solid need for response and juggle these multiple apps, which makes them lose focus on the current tasks that they are doing. Context-switching drives us to multitask. It feels like we are encouraged to multitask by overwhelming us with all these apps to distract us from the things that matter the most.

Multitasking is not a humanly possible thing to do in the first place. Our minds are not meant to juggle multiple activities at the same time. However, we can still put focus on one activity while doing other automatic activities, such as talking while driving and listening to instrumental music while writing/painting/studying. It can be done up until one point when a car passes you from the right side to get in front of you, and rap music comes in when you are trying to focus on your next blog post or painting.

When a distraction occurs, your brain will shift its focus instantly, forcing you to focus only on one thing at a time.

Some studies in the past state that multitasking increases the work output’s error rate, and it takes more time to finish a task due to the switching cost of your attention.

If we know that multitasking is bad for us, why do we keep doing it? Why can’t people stop it? There are three possible reasons for this:

1. It’s how our economy is designed, where we are demanded to get our work done quickly to move on to other tasks. It includes answering questions from multiple co-workers, meeting the deadline from a boss, tackling an urgent request from a colleague, etc. It creates a sense of urgency for all of us to keep doing what we are doing with more tasks and do it faster, making it harder to increase output and reach goals.
2. Social Capital. As social beings, we feel obliged to respond to our friends as quickly as possible. We want to appear as good people and citizens to others. It’s our social nature to be accepted in society.
3. Social Identity. How we want to project our impressions to others. It is called impression management. It’s how we manage our images to others. With the help of technology, it’s just getting easier to create our online identity to project it into our real-life identity.

These technologies are supposed to help us with our work to achieve the optimum productivity level, but why does it feel like things are worsening now?

Our ability to maintain Focus has been dropping, and it is happening in the workplace and general attention span. Some of us could guess the source of the problem by directing the issue to the rise of smartphone usage and apps that occupy our attention; hence we lose Focus. But it’s just one of the sources. The real reason is more nuanced than just pointing fingers at smartphones and apps.

In her book, Attention Span: Finding Focus for a Fulfilling Life, Psychologist Gloria Mark concludes that overall human attention span on screen has dropped significantly over the last 20 years from typically 2.5 minutes in 2004 down to 75 seconds in 2011, and now it reached 47 seconds only. Nowadays, people only take 47 seconds before they switch to another screen.

According to Dr. Mark:

Though one of the problem sources is indeed apps and its notification which keep interrupting people, people also keep interrupting themselves to these apps to cope with their feelings. It can be anxiety, depression, stress, shame, etc.

We live in the age of overstimulation, where we have received tons of information that can and can’t be good for our well-being. It affects our emotions and behavior. Whenever we feel bored and anxious, we distract ourselves to our phones and apps we have to cope with those feelings. For example, we prefer to direct attention to TikTok to find some short entertainment, resulting in spending more than 1–3 hours there daily.

But we never let our minds wander and try to understand why we are feeling bored and anxious in the first place. We numb it through phones and apps.

Four Stages of Attention

Most people would think that humans only have two types of attention: focused and unfocused, but the truth is more nuanced than that. In fact, according to Dr. Mark, there are four stages of attention:

1. Focused: when people are highly engaged and highly challenged. Imagine writing, where you must simultaneously put your creativity into words that require your attention and creative challenge.
2. Rote: when people are highly engaged but have yet to be challenged. Playing games like Solitaire and Candy Crush are good examples because it’s easy to do, giving us instant rewards and making us feel happier. Another example is washing dishes, peeling potatoes, doing crossword puzzles, etc.
3. Boredom: when people are not both engaged and challenged. Imagine when you have nothing to do.
4. Frustrated: when people are not engaged but highly challenged. Imagine the work you are doing now but don’t like it and feel engaged. You feel more frustrated out of it.

People would feel happier on the Rote stage because it’s an easy thing to do and rewarding. It gives them a positive feeling that makes them feel good. Imagine scrolling TikTok and Instagram to see those short bursts of videos that make you happy, then receive “likes” on the photos you just posted.

On the other hand, boredom and frustration are where most people feel unhappiest because both don’t require any attention. In these states, Dr. Mark finds interesting fact that:

When people are not engaged in something, they will try to devote their attention to something else, in this case, time. So, that’s why we always keep checking on time when we are bored. It’s just how our attention works when it’s not engaged in any activities.

How to improve attention span

Think of our attention span like a fully watered bucket that needs to be spent daily to nurture the plants we are growing until it comes to fruition to harvest them. Water is our attention. Water in a bucket is a limited resource of attention. We can’t spend it on whatever things catch our attention because it will be gone by the time we need to water things that matter.

We want to ensure we don’t use a leaky bucket because it will dry out the water faster before we water all the plants we need to nurture.

A leaky bucket is the same as putting our own attention to the things that do not matter, such as spending a lot of time on social media, clicking random links that result in a rabbit hole, getting into some stupid online arguments, keeping up with the Joneses, etc., that distract us to the things that we really care about. Things like our purposes, goals, being present while hanging out with friends, completing a work task that’s moving the needle, learning new things, enjoying the present moment, etc.

Knowing where we put our attention is a muscle we need to build. It’s not an instant skill that we had when we were born. Here are some exercises that we can do to take control of what we put our attention to:

Get a good night’s sleep

I keep tracking the quality of my sleep every day. I sleep and wake up at the same time almost every day. By having a consistent routine, I know if there’s something different in my later activities throughout the day due to a change in my sleep quality, like my gym energy level, as a clear example. Every time I sleep late by 1–2 hours, it will cost my energy level by 10–20%. I won’t have the strong willpower to push my gym performance.

Surprisingly, lack of sleep or sleep death can also affect our attention level. Sleep death is an accumulation of how many hours of lack of sleep because we can’t hit our regular sleeping schedule, usually 6–8 hours for an adult. The greater the numbers, the greater cost of overall human attention level.

Data shows that people who don’t get a good night’s sleep tend to do more lightweight activities rather than challenging ones. So it’s harder for them to go from Rote to Focused Attention.

Lightweight activities include checking on social media, replying to emails, playing easy games, etc., because they have less willpower to do challenging things. It’s important to note down so we are aware whenever we subconsciously prefer to spend time on Rote rather than Focused.

Self-regulation

Self-regulation is the ability to gain (or regain) a sense of control over one’s behavior and life. It is a skill that we can master though some people are naturally born good at it due to their unique personalities. Here’s an example:

Based on the big five personalities, people who have more neurotic traits tend to have shorter attention spans, while more conscientious people will have longer ones since they are more discipline than others.

Everyone will indeed start with a different set of the bar for self-regulation skills they have, but it can be improved. Someone with good self-regulation can control their emotion by resisting their impulsive behavior that might worsen the whole situation and not stick deeper down the rabbit hole.

The most practical way to start is by monitoring where most of our attention goes, whether it is work, friends, apps, tv and movies, online articles, games, books, etc. For example, if it’s apps, we can further narrow it down into some questions:

Which apps? How much time is spent on these? Can I reduce it? How? Why do I use these apps in the first place? Is it because I’m bored/anxious? If yes, why? What kind of expectations do I put on these apps? Do I get the benefit of it? Do I have control over these apps, or am I being controlled by them?

Doing regular check-up on where most of our attention goes will help us to focus on the things that matter, such as understanding a deeper part of ourselves, which eventually result in being able to take control of how we want to spend our days moving forward wisely, strategically, and with more intention.

Take a break

The water in our bucket is a limited resource. We can’t maintain our focus for a long period. We need a break. We need to step back to refill the water:

A study found that a 20-minute walk in nature significantly increases people’s ability to generate more ideas, called divergent thinking. Additionally, it can help to reduce stress.

We need to take a break by not doing anything meaningful and productive. It helps us to replenish our energy and creativity. It’s okay to be doing more of Rote activities as relaxing time. Ludwig Wittgenstein, considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, got his best ideas while peeling potatoes. Maya Angelou like to do crossword puzzles in her spare time.

But it’s suggested to not open the phone and social media to fill our breaks because it’s really easy to get stuck there, leaving us feeling more fatigue at the end of the day. We must develop an agency to control where we spend most of our energy.

Practice forethought

Forethought is about understanding that your current action can affect your future self at the end of the day. Before we follow the urge of opening social media apps or any distractions, we need to ask ourselves:

What will my day look like? Do I want to still be working and chasing the deadline at 10pm and feeling fatigue or do I want to spend my evening relaxing, drinking wine, watching my favorite tv show, and spending time with family?

We need to ask these kinds of questions to set our days to be more prepared with more intention rather than following any urge that we feel by being stuck in the rabbit hole of phones and apps.

Instead of optimizing short-term pleasure by following our urges to have distractions which eventually give us more pain, shame, and insufficiency at the end of the day, forethought allows the future pain to be front-loaded in the beginning when we are doing the decision-making process. It helps us to think more clearly.

P.S. This post was originally published on Fitgeist.