Photo by Daniel Cañibano on Unsplash
Recently I gave my History of Computing lecture to a group of hi-tech employees. After I’d finished, an engineer came to me and complimented me in an unexpected way. “These days”, he said, “I have a three minute attention span. After three minutes of listening to anything out comes my smartphone… but in your lecture I put it right back in my pocket!”
It is pleasant to hear this kind of feedback, but as an information overload expert it set my mind thinking about the first part of his comment. The part about the three minutes attention span.
Three minutes (again)
Actually, the three minute figure rang a bell. This was the astounding finding of the research by Prof. Gloria Mark of UC Irvine. After observing knowledge workers “in the wild”, she found that they stop whatever they’re doing and switch to doing something else every 3 minutes on average (of course after 3 more minutes they don’t resume the previous task, because something else had come in; half the tasks are only resumed – for 3 minutes, presumably – the next day!)
Gloria’s finding put a number to what we all know: modern knowledge work – and today’s life in general – is terribly fragmented, although the segment length of 3 minutes was shorter than we’d realized. It was also interesting that half the interruptions were external – incoming emails, coworkers popping into one’s cubicle, etc. – but the other half were self-induced, like deciding to check a news site or to take a trip to the water cooler. The implications of this chopped up workflow are severe, and have been covered in the research literature; you can see a summary in my insight articles. And yet, that was in 2004, long before the arrival of the smartphone!
Now, what that engineer I was talking to was describing was a self-induced interruption he’d experience while listening to a lecture – and his (admittedly qualitative) feeling was that he’d induce the interrupt in three minutes. That’s a deterioration from 2004, if you do the math; and it emphasizes self-interruption, a.k.a. short attention span, which seems to be replacing email overload as the main mechanism of fragmentation.
A mixed blessing
Besides the three minute figure, the engineer’s statement highlights the role of the smartphone in our reduced attention span. These elegant, marvelous devices (as an engineer and a geek I am truly full of admiration for the functionality crammed into these tiny packages) have revolutionized our access to timeless knowledge, to real-time information, and to each other; truly they are the quintessential achievement of the tool-making ape. But they have a heavy downside.
Smartphones are addictive, and can devastate our ability to think and function in multiple ways; in the case of young children they can cause even more severe developmental damage. But in the context of this post, we should focus on their availability as a convenient, ever-present on-demand distraction. Having a short attention span in previous centuries meant you’d sit through the lecture and only half-listen; or, at the workplace, sit through the meeting and doodle on your notepad. You couldn’t totally disconnect unless you fell asleep during the meeting, which you tried to avoid as it risked an embarrassing reprimand when the boss noticed. But today all you have to do is whip out your phone, and you have a world of fun, games and information at your fingertips; and the worst of it is, there is no risk at all – your boss won’t reprimand you because they too are doing the same thing, and it’s become acceptable behavior. Thus, the three minute attention span is greatly assisted – and encouraged – by the smartphone’s availability.
Implications for content creators
The fact that everyone today has a fleeting attention span has great impact on how we produce content. Information must be delivered in small packages; nobody expects people to read anything lengthy. If Abraham Lincoln were alive today, his Gettysburg Address would have been delivered in a few tweets.
This is a serious burden on the content creator. Consider the saying “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead,” attributed to Mark Twain. Making a message shorter is hard work; writing for attention-deficient readers requires subterfuge – instead of thinking about the content, you think about how to entice people not to pull out that cellphone. This makes for better copy, perhaps (remember Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”) – but it requires more time, skill, and talent.
Alternatively, we must now make things twice as interesting so people are willing to keep their phones in their pockets… gone are the days of captive audiences: our lectures or presentations must compete with the entire internet!…
Implications for workplace interaction
Another thought about the three minutes: we used to assume that our coworkers, our employees and our bosses are in the workplace in order to create value; and that to do so, their mind would be on the job at hand and on furthering it by interacting with us and with others around them. Not any more, though: today we must assume that the folks we work with will lose interest in whatever is going on after three minutes. This is a bad, bad thing: it has made meetings, those hotspots of brainstorming and creative problem solving, into defocused sessions where everybody is eyeing their phone screens, their minds light years away from the matter at hand – the meeting’s chairperson included. I suppose playing on a phone while I lecture about the innovative history of computing is not harmful to the audience’s company (though I’m glad I managed to keep them riveted!) – but in a work meeting it would be definitely detrimental.
What YOU can do about this
I’d love to give you a magic potion that would restore your attention span to that of your grandparents… but I can’t. After over a decade of smartphone use and social media the harm is probably irreversible: your brain has been rewired by the addiction, and you will feel the urge to take out your phone whenever someone addresses you at length. So what can you do?
On a personal level – now we’re in the “self-help” domain – you should certainly take stock and try to de-program this destructive habit – even going from three to six minutes of attention can be a useful triumph. One way to consider is Digital Detox – you can start by assigning slots of Quiet Time where you turn off your phone completely and avoid the Internet to focus on reading books, generating creative content, attending to family, or pursuing a hobby.
As a manager, you can put your foot down about frivolous (i.e. non-mission-related) smartphone use during the meetings you chair – there is nothing wrong in setting a standard where using a phone is unacceptable. It is, after all, disrespectful to the presenter and to the team. If a president of the US could do it, so can you.
Lastly, as a parent, you can try and intervene to save your kids from having their attention decimated. Control the screen time of your younger children rigorously – and pay close attention to what your teenagers are doing.
There – how many minutes have you put into reading this post?…
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