You are probably not losing your ability to pay attention. You are practicing a habit of switching, and your environment offers endless chances to practice it. That is the core idea from my conversation with Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at UC Irvine.
The capacity is intact. The practice changed.
Gloria has measured screen behavior for more than twenty years. In 2004, her team found that people stayed on one screen for about two and a half minutes before switching. Starting around 2016, the average dropped to 47 seconds. She is careful about what that means. We still have the same attentional mechanisms we have always had. What changed is our practice. We now spend less time on any one thing on a screen.
Many of us treat this as a failure of discipline, in ourselves, our kids or our coworkers. Gloria points somewhere else. Some interruptions come from outside, such as pings, texts and email. Many come from within. A person working in a document suddenly flips to email, social media or the news. Nobody prompted it. It comes from habit. Interrupting ourselves is not new, but there are now far more chances to get used to doing it.
When the pings stop, the habit fills the gap
Gloria describes a study of external and internal interruptions. When outside interruptions went down in an hour, internal ones went up. Her reading is that “people are just determined to be interrupted.” The habit kicks in when nothing else is doing the interrupting. Her group’s published work on self-interruption at work also links the two, finding that external interruptions in one hour were followed by more self-interruption in the next.
Not every interruption does harm. Gloria found that questions tied to a person’s current work were often welcome, because they offered a new way to think about the task or a chance to help a colleague. Off-topic interruptions were simply disruptive. She also describes attention residue. When we deal with an interruption, it stays in our mind and gets in the way of the task we return to.
Boredom plays a part too. Gloria notes that bored people tend to turn to social media and often end up more bored. She sees boredom as a signal that we want something more meaningful to do. That can be a quiet walk where the mind wanders. It can also be a phone call to another person.
One thing to try
This week, watch for the moment before you switch. You are mid-task and you feel a small pull toward a tab, a feed or a quick search. Name it as a habit rather than a flaw. Write the thought on a notepad, then stay with the task a little longer. If you want a social break, save it for a real conversation rather than a one-minute chat. Gloria’s view is that a longer break satisfies the social need better.
You are not training a broken brain. You are noticing a practice you can change.