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How to focus like it’s 1990
Attention spans have dwindled since the mobile phone and the Internet became ubiquitous, but there are ways to get some old-school concentration back
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Turning off notifications is a good way to reduce distractions but it will not completely solve the problem.
PHOTO: PEXELS
Dana G. Smith
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In 2004, Dr Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, watched knowledge workers go about a typical day at the office. Using a stopwatch, she noted every time they switched tasks on their computer, moving from a spreadsheet to an e-mail to a webpage to a different webpage and back to the spreadsheet. She found that people averaged just 2½ minutes on a given task before switching.
When Dr Mark repeated the experiment in 2012, the average time office workers spent on a task had dropped to 75 seconds. And it has continued to drop from there.
