Pod Insights Modern Wisdom How To Regain Control Of Your Attention - Dr Gloria Mark About this episode Dr Gloria Mark is Chancellor's professor in the Department of Informatics at University of California and an author whose research focuses on human-computer interaction.
Not being able to focus and suffering with distracted attention is one of the most common complaints amongst people in the modern world. The ability to stay focussed on a single task for a long period of time is hugely beneficial and yet has never been more difficult to achieve.
Expect to learn what attention actually is and how it works, the average amount of time that people spend on a single task in the modern world, why attention is so easy to distract, whether multitasking is actually a thing, how to take back control from your distractions, how to deal with guilt around being distracted, the best way to design your daily routine for maximum focus and much more...
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#focus #attention #productivity
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00:00 Intro
00:56 Is Our Attention Worse Than it Was 20 Years Ago?
05:15 Misunderstanding How Attention Works
10:12 The Basics of our Attention System
17:13 Is ADHD Becoming More Common?
20:37 Seeing Attention as a Precious Resource
24:47 It Isn’t Humanly Possible to Multitask
32:42 Is our Relationship with Technology Addictive?
38:29 The Impact of Algorithms on our Attention
46:52 Developing the Skill of Self-Regulation
58:45 Don’t Use Social Media on Your Break
1:03:12 Designing Your Day for Maximum Focus
1:13:29 Where to Find Dr Mark
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Transcript 11,692 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 We find that half of all of our measurements show people's attention to be less than 40 seconds. Yes, of course, sometimes we spend longer, but half the time that we're on our devices, our attention spans are 40 seconds or less in duration.
0:16 Chris Williamson? I would guess that managing my attention and the associated trials and tribulations that I go through trying to achieve that is probably the most common challenge that I face on a daily basis. And I also think that it's one that a lot of other people will resonate with as well. They don't need to be a podcaster, but just attention is something that feels to me to be slipping through my fingers on a second by second basis.
0:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, and that's what our research shows. And I've been studying this for a very long time, for about two decades. And yeah, you are not alone. There are many, many people who share your concern.
0:55 Chris Williamson? Given that you've been studying it for quite a while, have you looked at any longitudinal stuff to do with this? Have we had degradation over time? Is it worse now than it was 20 years ago?
1:04 Speaker 00 Yes, as a matter of fact, I have. So I first started studying this back in 2004. And what led me to study this was I noticed my own attention was becoming problematic. And I found myself switching from project to project and, you know, app to app and webpage to webpage. And I wondered if it was just me. And I started talking to other people. Other people started mentioning similar kinds of things. So, you know, being a researcher and a psychologist, I thought I can study this empirically and find out if it's just
1:46 Speaker 00 me. So at the time, back in 2004, we used pretty primitive technology to measure this. We used stopwatch. So we would click the stopwatch every time a person shifted screens.
2:03 Speaker 00 And it, you know, it's very accurate, but it was very laborious and, you know, it took a long time. But we were able to get objective results. And back then, we found attention was about two and a half minutes on any screen before people switched to another screen. At the time, it astounded me. But I kept measuring this and then computer logging techniques were invented, which made the process so much easier. They again could get very objective measures of how long people are on any computer or phone screen. Around 2011, we found attention spans to decline to about 75 seconds.
2:45 Chris Williamson? What was that mean? First one was two and a half minutes?
2:47 Speaker 00 Two and a half minutes down to about a minute and 15 seconds. And this is on average. And in the last five, six years, we find it's about it's reached a steady state of about 47 seconds on any screen before switching. This has also been replicated by others who found results within a few seconds. So it seems to be that our attention spans have diminished. And let me present another way to look at this, which I think is, you know, makes makes you see this perhaps more clearly. If you look at the median of our measurements, that means the midpoint,
3:32 Speaker 00 the midpoint, we find that half of all of our measurements show people's attention to be less than 40 seconds. So, you know, yes, of course, sometimes we spend longer, but half the time that we're on our devices, our attention spans are 40 seconds or less in duration.
3:53 Chris Williamson? That is absolutely terrifying.
3:56 Speaker 00 It is. And, you know, I was surprised back in 2004, but I am continued to be amazed.
4:05 Chris Williamson? What has happened over the last 20 years that has had the biggest impact on our attention?
4:13 Speaker 00 You know, I'm not sure we can say there's one single influence. There are so many things.
4:22 Speaker 00 Of course, there are individual differences. Some people happen to be better at self-regulation than others. There are, it's the fact that we're social beings. Our, it's our social natures. Don't forget, social media, the, the big one, Facebook came along in two thousand and three. And because of us being social creatures, we're just drawn to wanting to communicate with others.
4:49 Chris Williamson? I wonder what would have happened if you'd started your research a decade earlier. I wonder if you would have seen a real inflection at Facebook, because that was kind of a step change.
4:58 Speaker 00 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's such a great question, and I really wish that others had been studying this so that we could track this much longer. So, um, you know, unfortunately, we, we don't know because we don't have the data.
5:14 Chris Williamson? What do most people get wrong when it comes to thinking about how attention and distraction works?
5:21 Speaker 00 So there, there are several things. There, there are some myths. I, I think one myth is that we tend to blame all of our distractions on notifications, targeted algorithms, and that is certainly a source, absolutely can't deny it. But it turns out that people are just as likely to interrupt themselves. So about half the time, people interrupt themselves. And so we can't just blame it on, on something external to us, but also there's something within us. Uh, so that's, that's definitely, and, and another thing, um, and maybe we can spend some more time talking about it,
6:01 Speaker 00 is that people tend to think of us, of our attention as being in two states. You're focused or not focused. It turns out there's, it's a lot more nuanced and complicated than that.
6:14 Chris Williamson? Given that around about half of our distractions are self-generated, and yet we've seen attention go from two and a half minutes to 75 seconds to 43 seconds over the last 20 years, our nature hasn't changed. So what it would suggest is if 50% of an increased number of distractions, the calls coming from inside the house, that there is an interrelationship between the changes that we've seen environmentally that are now engendering some kind of internal state, which is causing us to distract ourselves more quickly. Is that fair to say?
6:48 Speaker 00 I think that's exactly right. I think you've nailed that, right? So it's who we are as humans. We have social natures. We have particular personality types. And there's this interaction with the environment, the digital world that we live in. And let me also point out that it's not just computers and phones, where we see attention spans to be short. But it turns out that other media that we watch, things like TV and film, the shot lengths of TV and film have also decreased over time. And they average now four seconds.
7:28 Chris Williamson? Did you have a look at, I think it's Fast and Furious 9?
7:33 Speaker 00 No.
7:33 Chris Williamson? I think, I may be misquoted on this. I think that Fast and Furious 9 is the blockbuster that has been released with the highest number of scene cuts ever.
7:45 Speaker 00 Oh, could be, yeah.
7:46 Chris Williamson? For precisely that reason. A TikTok generation that goes swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, that kind of pace.
7:56 Chris Williamson? See, the internet can hear that we're talking about it. Swipe.
7:59 Speaker 00 Yes.
7:59 Chris Williamson? That pace of, it's reflecting.
8:04 Chris Williamson? Like a pace, like a cadence, a tempo that people have got themselves used to when it comes to dealing with anything on a screen. And that's now, it's so crazy that the use of social media has impacted our expectations of what we see on a screen, which has then caused movies, which have been around for much longer, to have to reverse engineer our own new overclocked nature.
8:29 Speaker 00 Yeah. So it's, that's an interesting way to put it, but we have to be really careful. We can't make a causal claim. We can't say that the faster shot changes in TV and film have caused our attention spans. We can't say our attention spans have caused that. These are two parallel trends. The way I interpret it is that when you watch TV and film, it just reinforces us to have these short changes. And we don't know what's causing TV and film to be, to switch so fast. It could be that directors and editors themselves are influenced by their short attention spans.
9:11 Chris Williamson? Wow. We're all downstream from Steven Spielberg's attention span. Imagine that.
9:16 Speaker 00 Yes, yes. You know, or it could be that they're gearing their editing based on what they think would the audience will respond to. Or it could be something else. But we there, we can't say causality, but it's, it's a really interesting trend. I, I think that one, one thing that I, I do believe has an effect is that social media platforms constrain the length of content that we can post, right? It constrains our, our text, you know, Twitter, the length of videos like TikTok. And, and I do feel that this has
9:59 Speaker 00 an influence, you know, so people are used to having short snippets of content, right? They're used to snacking on social media. And, and I do feel that this has an effect.
10:10 Chris Williamson? This interrelationship between us, the predisposition that the human mind has for how attention works that has now potentially.
10:22 Chris Williamson? Bro signs being reinforced or weaponized or utilized by an ever speeding up technology input and then is now starting to reinforce. Going back to absolute basics, let's say that somebody has no idea how our attention system works. Why do we have an attention system? What is it? What does it mean? What are the nuts and bolts of attention?
10:46 Speaker 00 Well, you know, attention helps us survive in the world. Right. And there are different types of attention. There's conscious attention when you're really intentional about, you know, where you're paying, where you're paying attention to. But there's also automatic attention. And when we reach for our phones, when we go to check email or check social media, that's an automatic kind of attention. Like we're, we're just not really aware of that. So there, there's that. And, you know, there's the, the father of psychology, William James, has this wonderful quote.
11:29 Speaker 00 He says, everyone knows what attention is, right? It's, it's using your, your conscious awareness, devoting it to, to something. And I would say, of course, we know what attention is. We can't always control it. Right? There's a distinction between knowing what it is and knowing where to control it. But, you know, we have so many things on the internet. And ultimately the human mind is a bottleneck. We, we can't possibly take in all that information. And so we're, we're faced with our, our humanness and figuring out what, you know, what, what we can attend to, what we can't. And sometimes it.
12:14 Speaker 00 Gives us problems.
12:16 Chris Williamson? Yes, because there is more that we can attend to than we have capacity to attend to.
12:21 Speaker 00 That's right.
12:22 Chris Williamson? Means that we have this task switching, attentional distraction. I remember once hearing someone describe it the same way. They'd modeled how squirrels foraged for food. And they said that humans forage for information in a similar sort of way. Oh, this is something new. Oh, this is something, oh, this is something.
12:38 Speaker 00 Yeah.
12:38 Chris Williamson? You get one headline and half a paragraph into a news article before you decide to go to something else. Cause there might be something even better. So, okay, you you come up with, I think, a slightly novel way to categorize different types of attention. This sort of layer of four. What are those different types?
12:55 Speaker 00 Right. So I mentioned that, you know, most people tend to think there's two states of attention. You're focused or not focused. It's it's a lot more nuanced. And when I first started studying this, I realized, you know, you can pay attention to something and be challenged. So, you know, if I'm writing, I'm really using effort in writing and I'm engaged in it. And we have, humans have a limited amount of resources, cognitive resources. You can call it mental resources, attentional resources. It's our capacity of attention. Okay. And if you're doing focused work, you're using a lot of those resources.
13:40 Speaker 00 But we can also be engaged in something and not use much of our resources. An example is playing solitaire or, you know, I have an anagram game that I'd like to play. It's easy, but I'm really engaged in it and I'm not really putting in a lot of effort. It's not challenging. If you're not engaged or challenged, that's a state of boredom. Right? We all experience boredom at times. And if you're challenged with something and not at all engaged, we call that frustration. An example is when I have a tech problem. It really frustrates me and I'm just not engaged in it at all. I don't want to deal with it, but I have to. Right?
14:24 Speaker 00 And as a result, it gets me frustrated. So those are the four types.
14:29 Chris Williamson? Which quadrant are people the most fulfilled or the happiest in? And which are they the least happy in?
14:37 Speaker 00 Yeah, so this is really surprising. It turns out when people are engaged with something, but they're not challenged. Right? We call this rote attention or rote activity. Turns out people are the happiest. They feel the most positive when they do this. Why? Because it's easy. People like to do what's easy. Very often, when you play these simple kinds of games, you get rewards and you get rewarded very fast. And it, you know, brings people positive feelings. And, you know, strangely enough, they're happier than when they're focused. Why? Because when you're focused, it involves some amount of stress. Right? It can be very fulfilling, but it involves stress.
15:22 Speaker 00 On the other hand, people are the most unhappy. Well, of course, when they're frustrated and also when they're bored. Right? In fact, it's really interesting because when you're bored, you're not using any of these mental resources. And as a result, you have to devote them somewhere and you devote them to paying attention to time. Right? And so that's why when you're bored, you're always looking at your watch. You're looking at the clock because you have to be, you know, thinking of something. And so we tend to think of time.
15:57 Chris Williamson? Is rote attention where people will go when they're on social media? Is that engaged but not challenged?
16:03 Speaker 00 Yes, most of the time I would say yes. I mean, obviously there are times you can be on social media and you're using some amount of mental effort, but most of the time it's just, you know, easy rote kinds of activity.
16:20 Chris Williamson? What's kinetic attention then? Because you come up with this term too.
16:23 Speaker 00 Yeah. So, you know, I mentioned that, you know, half the time our observations show people spend 40 seconds or less on any screen.
16:34 Speaker 00 And you know, I was very intrigued by that. And of course, I observed a lot of people. And you know, I observe them switching their attention so fast and checking something and scrolling. And and I was looking for a word to describe that kind of attention behavior. It's dynamic. And so in physics, the term kinetic just seemed to explain it very well. So, you know, much of the time that we're on our screens, we use this kind of kinetic attention, you know, which is just we're not able to stay on one screen at the same time.
17:13 Chris Williamson? What do you think's happening with this prevalence of ADHD? Because I'm seeing more conversations around it now. Is it becoming more common? I don't know whether this is your area of expertise, or could you imagine that it might be common or possible for these environmental factors to influence ADHD?
17:29 Speaker 00 So I can't speak to the interaction of an individual with ADHD and certain distractors. What I can say is, and I wrote about this in my book, that I did a deep dive to look at the prevalence of ADHD. And in the adult US population, it seems to be roughly about eight and a half percent or so. And for younger people, I think up through the age of around 16 or so, the prevalence is higher.
18:06 Speaker 00 I think it's something like 14% or so, 16%.
18:13 Speaker 00 Oh,
18:15 Speaker 00 maybe, maybe I have those figures wrong. I think in the adult population, it's four and a half percent. And I think up to the age of 16, it's about eight and a half percent. So it's certainly prevalent, but you know, I wouldn't say it's an to me, this does not suggest an epidemic. I think what a lot of people are thinking, because I also hear these conversations, is that when people are on their computers and phones, their behavior mimics what ADHD behavior is like. But it doesn't mean that that individual has ADHD, because you can get off your computer. And you should be able to read a book, or you should be able to walk in nature.
19:00 Speaker 00 And you should be able to focus if you don't have ADHD. In other words, it it seems that there is a mimicking of this behavior without actually having ADHD.
19:11 Chris Williamson? Well, I think the concern that people have, and we mentioned it earlier on, is this bleed, right, from our technological relationship with regards to attention into our attentional environment generally, even when we go away from it. You know, if 50% of the reason that we're distracted is self-generated, you take the technology away, you still have an increased 20-year, relative 20-year stat of, I mean, you have, based on where it's at, because it was two and a half minutes down to less than one minute now, your 50% of self-generated stuff would have been the same as the entirety of your distractions, including external stuff only 20 years ago, which is absolutely crazy.
19:54 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I mean, I was talking to my housemate Zach earlier on, and he said, dude, I think I might have ADHD. I was like, what makes you say that? And he says, I walk into rooms all the time, and I don't know why I why I've gone in. I realized that I was supposed to go in for something, and I've forgotten the reason I was in there. And I said, how many times when you do that, are you on your phone?
20:14 Chris Williamson? And it's a lot. It's a lot of the time is in that task switching mode. And as you said, the half of the number of times that we get distracted, it's less than 43 seconds. So, you know, the amount of time it takes you to go from the kitchen to the bathroom or wherever it was to get whatever it is you needed. Yeah, it doesn't surprise me. Okay, so there is.
20:39 Chris Williamson? There is a battle for our attention at the moment, right? That that is the attention economy is.
20:46 Chris Williamson? Organizations, all of which are competing with each other, Netflix competing with Kindle, competing with Audible, competing with Facebook and Twitter and TikTok and everything. Attention is the prime resource that you have, I suppose, in that. Time is limited, your time on this earth is limited. And although time is a limited resource, what you do with your time is what you mean when you talk about time. You don't talk about time just as something that you can go and exchange for something else. The exchange that you make with time is how you deploy it with whatever you're focused on that's in front of you.
21:19 Speaker 00 That's right. Yeah, I mean, time is a precious resource. So is our attention. The other thing to keep in mind is when I talked about limited attentional resources, these are so precious. And every time we switch our attention, think of it as you have a tank of resources and that tank leaks because you're you're expending resources when you switch. And so there's so much to pay attention to and we utilize these mental resources when we pay attention to things, unless of course it's simple activity, then you know, we can, we can stretch our resources a bit farther. One of the things we find is that when people
22:04 Speaker 00 accumulate what's called sleep debt. Sleep debt is the accumulation of lack of sleep night after night. We find that as sleep debt increases, attention spans decrease. So, you know, if you're a person, you need eight hours of sleep a night, but you're only getting six hours. You're accumulating sleep debt. And what we find is, and we've measured people over the course of days, that their attention spans are shorter. And they, what do they do? They tend to do more lightweight activities like Facebook, for example.
22:42 Chris Williamson? Oh, so they'll stay engaged, but they won't go into challenge?
22:46 Speaker 00 Right, because they just don't have the mental resources available. They're, you know, the best, one of the best things you can do to increase your attention span is to get good sleep.
22:58 Chris Williamson? Wow. Yeah, I mean, one of the interesting things, especially having done this podcast, you'll be episode 600 or something. And over the last five years, I've got to be able to play with my mental capacity. You know, I really got a sense now for how agile everything feels up here. And I can usually relate that to my inputs. Did I get enough sunlight earlier on today? Did I sleep well? Am I hydrated? What's my blood sugar level like? Is it going up? Is it going down? Did I have a big meal? Am I stressed? Am I distracted? But like, ding ding ding ding? And I've got myself to the stage now where that, this is my, how would you say, primary
23:43 Chris Williamson? output of performance. This is the metric that I'm optimizing for, right? How quickly is my brain working? And what's my verbal dexterity to deploy that like? How quickly can I get that to move? And for me, as soon as I push sleep, as soon as I do, there's a ambient anxiety that comes in because I know that I can't perform as well on the show today as I could have done had I have gotten an extra hour and a half, or whatever it was. I had this big, I had this huge podcast. I went on Joe Regain's show toward the back end of summer. And two nights before it, I was in Houston Airport and they, all of the flights had stopped. And I got an Uber from Houston to Austin, because I just needed to get two nights of sleep. I knew that if I had two nights sleep
24:26 Chris Williamson? in my bed, that it wouldn't matter if I didn't get in until 4am, everything would be fine. So I can, I can absolutely guarantee that it is a huge impact when it comes to mental agility, verbal dexterity, focus, attention, even the creativity side of stuff as well. So going into, I mean, one of the topics I've discussed a number of times on the show is to do with multitasking, multitasking versus monotasking.
24:52 Chris Williamson? Everyone will be familiar with this. Anybody that's listening that thinks that multitasking is even a thing, and by multitasking, we mean parallel processing, right? Not switching from one thing to the other. What is the elevator pitch for someone that believes I can do two or three things at once that will stop them from realizing that?
25:10 Speaker 00 It's not humanly possible. It's not humanly possible to do two or more things at the same time that require mental effort, right? If you're going to use conscious attention, you can only pay attention to one thing at a time. What people are doing is they're switching their attention. Now, you can, you can be consciously aware and devote your attention to something and then do something automatic on the side. So, you know, I can be writing and there could be easy music playing in the background. But as soon as rap music comes on, I might start listening to the lyrics and then I'm devoting attention
25:53 Speaker 00 to that. So if one activity is automatic, that, that
25:59 Chris Williamson? Like driving a car.
26:00 Speaker 00 Like driving a car is automatic, you can talk at the same time. But as soon as the car swerves in front of you, then all of a sudden your attention is focused on that car in front of you and you stop talking, right? Because now your conscious attention is directed at that thing in front of you. So it's not humanly possible to, as you say, parallel process, do two or more things that require effort at the same time.
26:26 Chris Williamson? And what is the red pill when it comes to multitasking, as in task switching quickly? Just how bad and degrading is that to the quality of our work?
26:37 Speaker 00 Well, it, it has effects for sure. So first of all, you know, we know that people have more errors when they multitask. And there's been studies done with physicians, nurses, pilots, that show when they switch their attention, they make more errors. One scary study showed physicians make a lot of prescribing errors when, when they multitask. We know that it takes more time to finish a task because there's something called a switch cost. So every time you're switching your attention from one task to another, It takes some time to reorient to that new task and that's called a switch cost.
27:22 Speaker 00 And probably the worst news of all is that stress increases when people multitask. So we know from decades of laboratory research that blood pressure goes up when people multitask. There's a physiological marker in the body that increases when people multitask. In my research, we've used heart rate monitors. We had people wear heart rate monitors in their offices. And we've also measured their switching of attention. And we find this correlation. The faster the attention switching, the higher is the stress measured.
28:02 Speaker 00 And you know, the last thing of all is that when we ask people about their perceived stress, they report higher perceived stress when they multitask. All of these measurements are consistent. And they paint a picture that says that multitasking is just not a good idea. If you want to be productive, if you want to be effective in your work and you want to have well-being.
28:28 Chris Williamson? Why, if it's the case that multitasking causes people to experience stress physiologically, why is it so alluring to do multitasking? I would have presumed that we would have had this felt sense of the blood pressure and everything else. You don't want to keep doing this and yet people continue to do it.
28:48 Speaker 00 Yeah, so I would say, you know, there's several reasons. In the workplace, people just have to react to the demands of their work environment. So people are, by their preference, people are monotaskers. People prefer doing monochronic work. It's what makes people the happiest. But we live in a world that's polychronic, which means doing, switching your attention among multiple things. So you're in a workplace and all of a sudden you get a Slack message or email where you should switch your attention to something else. Someone comes into your office and asks you a question. So, you know, it's the polychronic environment that's causing us to switch.
29:31 Speaker 00 But there's also, you know, I talked about our social natures, right? We have social natures where we're just compelled to want to.
29:41 Speaker 00 Respond to other people because we care about something called social capital. Right? We, we want to be in good, um, you know, to appear uh in good, well, good esteem with others. And so we respond to their messages. We, you know, we want to be good citizens. So it's our social natures wrapped up in this as well. And of course, um, there are individual differences with self-regulation. Some people just have this urge to be switching their attention and that's, you know, it's, it's their natures.
30:16 Chris Williamson? I remember reading an article a little while ago that said, "Wearing noise-canceling headphones in an open plan office helps a little bit, reducing cognitive errors by 14%, but actual silences reduces those errors by one-third." So everybody just needs to shut up, basically.
30:32 Speaker 00 I, I think so, yes.
30:34 Chris Williamson? What about monotasking but being interrupted? Let's say that it's not task switching, let's, but there is some sort of interruption that occurs. Have you looked at that?
30:44 Speaker 00 We have. So, you know, it's, it's really interesting. So I have done a laboratory study where I had people do a task. And in, in one case, they, they were not interrupted. And in the other case, we gave them interruptions, this same task. And we measured how long it took for them to do the task. So we subtracted the time out from doing the interruptions. Strangely enough, and it's counterintuitive, people actually perform the task faster when they were in the condition where they were interrupted. Now, a couple of things to keep in mind. It sounds good. Sounds like it's good news for multitasking. But there was a price, and the price was that stress increased.
31:30 Speaker 00 So people worked faster, but the stress went up. Now, the other thing, this is a laboratory experiment and people did this over an hour, but over the course of an entire day, right? This, uh, this is just not, not, not tenable. Um, you know, there was another study done where they had people do difficult tasks over a six hour period, which is, you know, more similar to, uh, to a day. And they found that when you're expending your mental resources to do something difficult, uh, and it could be like switching attention, uh, people had less ability as time went on
32:14 Speaker 00 to be able to, um, guard against distractions. So they be, they made more impulsive choices. And so, you know, it shows that our, you know, there's parts of the mind that wear down. There's a part of the mind called executive function that can't function as well as it should. And this is what we can expect when people are multitasking.
32:41 Chris Williamson? Do you think it's right to use the term tech addiction when talking about people's relationship to their phones and screens? Or would tech compulsion or something else be more accurate?
32:53 Speaker 00 Yeah, I, I like to stay away from the term addiction. It's, it's a very strong word and there's, there is a very precise definition for addiction in the medical community. I think, uh, compulsion is, is a more accurate, uh, way to explain what's going on and to describe it, that people, we do have this compulsion when we sit in front of our screens and even when we, we don't, we have this compulsion to reach for our phones.
33:25 Chris Williamson? What's the difference between an addiction and a compulsion?
33:29 Speaker 00 Well, you know, when you have an addiction and when it's taken away, you have withdrawal effects. So, and That of course might be, you know, a lot of people might experience that. Some people may consider themselves addicted. But you know, I think compulsion is a softer term to use. I like to stay away from these kinds of extreme definitions because I think, you know, I think compulsion is a more apt way to describe. And I do think that people, certainly people have the capability to exert control. They can take control.
34:13 Speaker 00 And you know, when you're addicted, it's a little bit hard to take control.
34:20 Chris Williamson? So I changed the wording that I used about six months ago when I had Dr. Andrew Huberman from Stanford on the show. And he said the exact same thing. He sort of term checked me on calling it a tech addiction. He said, to me, it behaves much more like a compulsion.
34:37 Speaker 00 Yes.
34:38 Chris Williamson? The reason I like that reframe as well is it, it puts the power back in your hands. We can't underestimate how important the lexical linguistic tools that we use to describe the things that we're doing in our lives are, right? If you
34:55 Speaker 00 That's right.
34:56 Chris Williamson? If you were to call it, let's say, a tech law, you know, like the law of thermodynamics, I have to pick up my phone. It's that sort of indefeatable attractor.
35:07 Speaker 00 Yeah.
35:08 Chris Williamson? That would be even stronger, right? This would be like a law of the universe, but it's not. Okay. So why don't we not only use more accurate language, which is also, as far as I can see, kind of more empowering to the individual, more sovereignty, more agentic, et cetera, et cetera.
35:22 Speaker 00 I do believe that people can develop agency over their attention. So I think you're absolutely right. I agree with you that calling a tech compulsion paves the way for people to be able to develop agency, to understand that they can develop agency.
35:45 Chris Williamson? I learned from you that the guy that invented the internet designed the internet to replicate the way that a human brain works. And because he did that, it's basically too good. And that's why it's so slippery for us to get distracted. Can you explain that?
36:02 Speaker 00 It's so ironic, isn't it? So the idea for the web originated with an engineer by the name of Vannevar Bush in 1945. And this idea was called the Memex. And at the time, Vannevar Bush, he ran a very large scientific research office in the US and he was managing 6,000 scientists. And he was very frustrated with how information was organized. And at the time, there was the Dewey Decimal System. And he thought there's got to be a better way. And he was an innovator and he thought information should be designed the way people think.
36:47 Speaker 00 And that's by association. And the theory of how people's memory is organized is according to a human semantic network. We associate concepts together. So, you know, when I think of cat, I immediately think of dog or think of catnip or, you know, the name of my cat Buster. And so the Memex idea remained an idea, but then others came along and they built upon it and then the web was developed. And then, you know, of course, Tim Berners-Lee wrote the software that made it possible
37:27 Speaker 00 to exchange all kinds of media to, you know, associate nodes and links so that we could share all kinds of media. Now, where we are today is that
37:43 Speaker 00 The web, the way it's designed mimics the way human memory is organized. And there are so many entry points into our minds network. When we go on, say, a Wikipedia page, we'll be reading something. And it primes us with so many different ideas and associations. And then we see a link and we've been, you know, cognitively primed to be thinking of that. We click on it. We read new content. And again, there's just this firestorm of associations that goes on in our mind. We see another link, click on that. And so there's this mirroring of the behavior we're doing on the web, the way the web is organized and the way our minds work.
38:28 Chris Williamson? What has happened from what already sounds like a pretty optimized environment when it comes to trying to encourage people to follow down whatever path it is that their attention takes them on? What has happened with the introduction of algorithms and AI?
38:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, so, you know, every time you go on the internet, and you, you know this, you leave digital traces, right? You, you, you like things, you comment on things, you visit certain sites. And so algorithms are, can be very sophisticated to take a person's digital information. And they can be used to target information that will make that person want to respond to it. So, you know, person's personality can be detected through algorithms. And so, you know, advertising can be geared to you. Notifications can be geared to you.
39:27 Speaker 00 You know, if your personality type is, if you happen to be an extrovert, ads can be geared towards, you know, what, what extroverts might want to respond to. So, yeah, we, we live in a world where our digital information is being used and incorporated into algorithms to, to capture our attention.
39:52 Chris Williamson? The thing that I learned from Stuart Russell, guy that wrote Human Compatible, he's also like, it's the textbook when it comes to computer science. I think he's Mr. Algorithms. And he wrote a book called Human Compatible, which is trying to reverse engineer algorithms to be more pro-human.
40:09 Chris Williamson? This app, I completely lost my mind when I learned this in his book. So he said that
40:18 Chris Williamson? the way that algorithms work is that they are prediction engines trying to work out what it is that you want. Yeah. To maximize, usually click through, sometimes click through and watch time, some other metrics. But it's like, will you click on this or will you be interested by this? And there's two ways that the algorithm discovered that it could achieve this. Remembering that the algorithms, for the most part, are black boxes. You know, for everybody saying, we want to see what's happening inside of YouTube's algorithm. Their own devs don't know what's going on. That's right. They don't have a clue. They just set it away with an optimizing function. And now it's this big beast that's able to deliver funny cat videos when you want them. Right. Two ways to do it, right? First way is you can, the algorithm can deliver to you more accurate predictions for what it is that you want.
41:03 Chris Williamson? The other way is to change your preferences to be easier to predict. So there is a two way street going on between AI algorithms and the users of that platform. That's right. If you are, for instance, able to allegedly make individuals more partisan, more extreme in their views. It is significantly easier for you to detect what it is that they will want because there is less nuance. If you have someone that's in the middle, they're going to fall either side on different points of view. Whereas if you can push them out to the sides and then when you roll on top of that, we'll get into it. The desire for sort of social approval, our inherent tribal biases. You have this sort of reinforcement mechanism.
41:45 Chris Williamson? And then there's a third element that I really wish I'd spoken to him about, which is audience capture from creators that make content. So you have this two way relationship, right? AI to user, back and forth, trying to predict, but also trying to reprogram in order to make them easy to predict. But then you also have me. So I am someone who creates the content that the algorithms are deploying to the people. And I am being influenced by what happens and what the people that are watching my stuff click on. So there is a concept called audience capture, which you might be familiar with. Where a creator starts to continue to feed red meat to his audience, his or her audience, they start to do what the audience, they know the audience will respond to as
42:27 Chris Williamson? opposed to what to them feels creatively right. And what you end up with having there is an ever more sort of caricatured, extreme, one dimensional version of that creator, because they back themselves into a corner of constantly being cooked by their own audience. The audience just
42:41 Speaker 00 Yes.
42:42 Chris Williamson? tells them what they want to do. So there is now a third element in this menage à trois of attention, distraction. And yeah, I found that that two way relationship fascinating. And then you layer on top the creator and the audience capture. I thought that was so interesting.
42:58 Speaker 00 That's right. There's so much to talk about with the algorithms. Algorithms can be very agile. And an example of that is the TikTok algorithm. So TikTok learns very quickly what you like, and it feeds you the videos based on, you know, what it thinks you like. Then as soon as you change and you start finding something else of interest, the algorithm is, you know, it's flexible, it changes, and it starts learning what your new preferences are. So algorithms learn from humans' behavior and they adapt.
43:37 Chris Williamson? This is then reinforced, as you said before, by us wanting social connections online, right?
43:42 Speaker 00 Yes.
43:44 Chris Williamson? The fact that social media is social, we have this predisposition for wanting to be connected, for wanting status, for wanting belonging, so on and so forth. So this creates an incentive for us to actually become more distracted in an ever more convenient world.
44:00 Speaker 00 Yes, that's right. I mean, there are so many aspects to our social natures. And as you put it so nicely, the interaction between our social natures and the computing environment. So I mentioned the idea of social capital. There's also identity, you know, people are very concerned about their social identity, not just the identity on social media, but work identity. And as a result, you know, people are compelled to
44:32 Chris Williamson? What do you mean when you talk about identity?
44:34 Speaker 00 So how you present yourself to others on the web? So the the impression that you want others to have of you. So we spend a lot of time crafting our identities, right? And you know, some people spend more time than others because that's we're concerned with what's called impression management. And that means the impression that we want others to have of us. And sometimes, you know, we have more control over our online identity than we have over our identities in real life.
45:09 Chris Williamson? Absolutely, yeah, you can curate your online version of you significantly easier than you can create the real world version of you.
45:15 Speaker 00 Yeah, and and that can be a time sink for a lot of people. And of course, there's, you know, there's power relations. So you know, a person who's lower in the social hierarchy tends to spend more time looking out for messages from someone higher up on the hierarchy. So there's so many things that are going on when we talk about our social natures.
45:38 Chris Williamson? That's a very interesting element that I hadn't really considered. I've had a lot of conversations to do with status ancestrally and how that relates to the modern world too. Somebody who is low status, I mean, child mortality outcomes, pick what health lifespan, pick whatever outcome you want, basically. The higher your status, the better your outcomes in life for the most part, right? But another thing that you have is that as you become higher in status, you need to apply less energy to maintaining that identity, to keeping up appearances, because you kind of move under your own momentum.
46:17 Chris Williamson? If you're one of the top 10 people within your field, there is less requirement for you to constantly be hungry and checking. And what do people think about me? Because people already know about you, right? And that's a an element of status that I hadn't really considered before that adds to this power law of the the Matthew principle, right? The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The statusful get more statusful and they get more statusful in a more easy way.
46:42 Speaker 00 Yes, that's right. I mean, there's, there's so much nuance that's involved with using the internet, absolutely.
46:51 Chris Williamson? What's the relationship between our personality and self-regulation?
46:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, so some people were born with with good self regulation, so they're lucky. They were dealt a good set of cards. Others are not born so lucky. Just because you're not born with good self regulation doesn't mean you can't develop it. You can, you can develop it as a skill. But there are personality differences. We find that if a person scores high on what's called neuroticism, there's a personality instrument, that's the most widely used instrument to measure personality. It's called the big five. There are five dimensions of personality. One of those is neuroticism.
47:40 Speaker 00 Neuroticism is, you know, you have a propensity to be stressed. Neurotics tend to replay events over and over in your mind. You know, oh, I just had that conversation with that person. I should have, it should have played out differently. Neurotics tend to have the shortest attention spans. So, you know, shorter than than others. Now, if a person scores high on another one of these big five traits, that's called conscientiousness. And that means that you're very disciplined. You're a very disciplined person. They tend to actually check their email more because they don't want to let anything get through the cracks.
48:21 Speaker 00 And so, you know, we find that they have, they check more frequently than others. So there, there do seem to be personality differences.
48:30 Chris Williamson? That's very interesting. Conscientiousness is the best personality predictor of outcomes in life, I think, in terms of wealth and life achievement, overall educational outcomes as well. But there is a price that you pay for that industrious motivation to keep on thinking about things, to always be wanting to check. Yeah, I'm a, I'm moderate low in neuroticism, but I'm quite high in conscientiousness. So I'll blame my lack of attention on my inbuilt personality. Have you?
49:08 Chris Williamson? Have you looked at the relationship between technology and happiness? How happy people are either when using it, after using it, if there's an optimal amount, if there's a maximum amount?
49:21 Speaker 00 So I've looked at it more at a micro level in looking at the actions that people do and what makes them happy. So I know there's a lot of people who've looked at the relationship of social media and wellbeing and those results are pretty mixed. But we find that when people are doing this kind of rote activity, simple, mindless kinds of activity where they're still engaged, they do tend to be the happiest or, you know, it provides them a kind of solace.
49:55 Chris Williamson? And what about, have you looked at retrospective ratings of happiness there? Because that needs to be folded in, right? You know, the actions that you do and the pleasure that it gives you has consequences, not just in the moment, but also afterward. Or else everybody would just be taking MDMA and cocaine and a cocktail on a Lilo, right? There is, there is not just happiness, there would be meaning as well. You know, there would be satisfaction, there would be purpose. It wouldn't just be the state, it would be the trait effect of doing that. And I certainly know, maybe this is me trying to find a cope for the way that I, not shame, but sometimes the guilt that I feel after I've used my phone for too long, that yeah, maybe in the moment, there was a sense of pleasure.
50:38 Chris Williamson? And if you said, do a self-rating on how happy you are right now, like, yeah, I'm watching this good video about some documentary to do with space or something. But if I do that for two and a half hours, the way that I feel after that is all manner of self-flagellating unhappiness. So I wonder how, when you smear or aggregate tech use across an entire day, which includes your ability to reflect and ruminate on how much of a piece of shit you are because you just spent forever on TikTok or whatever, I wonder how that, that changes.
51:13 Speaker 00 Yeah, so, you know, it's interesting. You're, you're making me think of a study we did where we looked at happiness, you know, are people happier when they do social media, like Facebook, or when they have in-person interactions? And so we, we tracked people over the course of the day and Just like you said, in the moment, people are happiest when they do face-to-face interactions. So, you know, and it's, it's not surprising. Um, you know, we, we're, we're human, we like to interact with people. Um, but when you look over the course of the day and you ask people at the end of the day, how happy they are.
51:58 Speaker 00 Their happiness correlates very highly with the amount of time that they spent on Facebook. Now, at the time we did this study, Facebook was the most common social media used by this particular group of people. They were knowledge workers, all different work roles. Now, how do you explain that? Well, it's interesting. We, it, it, it didn't seem right to us that the more time on Facebook, the happier you are when you reflect on it over the course of the day. It also turns out that when people are really engaged in their work, and they're, you know, they have a lot of work to do when they need to be focused, um, it's actually better for
52:42 Speaker 00 them to do something simple like social media that doesn't require a lot of effort. Why? Because people can be in control of their attention to go in Facebook and out when they need to. When you're in an interaction, face-to-face, you're not always in control. You can be a prisoner in an interaction. It's hard to be impolite and suddenly cut yourself off when you have a lot of work to do. And so, for, for times when you have a lot of work to do, you've got a deadline, something like face-to-face can actually offer people a break, but if they use it strategically and they don't get stuck in the rabbit hole.
53:26 Chris Williamson? Ah, I see. Yes, so it's like an on-demand.
53:31 Chris Williamson? Uh, social break.
53:33 Speaker 00 Yeah.
53:34 Chris Williamson? Get. Well, one of the things that's kind of obvious is the story I tell myself about my social media use constitutes the lion's share of what that means to my life. You know, the time has gone, the hour that I spent watching the space documentary has gone. Uh, I have the option to tell myself that that was, I deserve a break, wanted a break, enjoyed a break. It doesn't matter. Let it go. Or I can lambast myself for the next couple of hours saying you need to grind your nose, put your nose against the grindstone in an attempt to try and make up for it. Um, have you looked at sort of guilt and shame around
54:19 Chris Williamson? our lack of attention? Because people's ability to self-flagellate that I should have worked harder, I should have done more. God, I finished today and I didn't do as much as I should have done. And the reason for that was I was just, I'm so distracted. I need to be more disciplined. Let me listen to some Jocko Willink and David Goggins motivational videos. I'm gonna put some rock music on. I'm gonna work until two in the morning. Have you looked at this?
54:42 Speaker 00 Yeah, of course. People feel terrible when they spend a good part of their day on social media and they feel that their work is neglected. Uh, that's, that's not a good thing, right? Uh, you know, on the one hand, I'm saying people are happiest when they do these, these things that make them engaged, but you know, it's not very challenging. But only if they do it wisely and strategically and not spend, you know, hours, uh, with their time doing that. So they have, people have to learn how to use these kinds of activities to their benefit. And it's really important to be able to take good breaks. So that's,
55:26 Speaker 00 that's something that people neglect to do. And we get ourselves exhausted. We're, you know, people can't hold sustained focus for lengthy periods in the same way that we can't lift weights for extended periods. We, we get exhausted. We, our mental resources get drained. So we need time to be able to take a break, to be able to step back. And you, you take whatever break works for you, right? But it's not a break that's. Extensive, if you've got a lot of work to do, you have to put limits.
56:02 Chris Williamson? What does a good break look like to you?
56:05 Speaker 00 The best break of all is to take a walk in nature, to go outside. So, you know, there's a really nice study that shows 20 minutes in nature makes people less stressed, relaxes them. I've done a study where we show that 20 minutes in nature significantly increases people's ability to generate ideas. It's called divergent thinking. And so the best break of all is get out in nature. I realize that circumstances don't allow always for going outside. And I know many of the listeners might be living in places right now where the weather...
56:46 Chris Williamson? Speaking to somebody that spent 33 years in the northeast of England, so yes, correct.
56:51 Speaker 00 Right. So, so there are other things we can do. It's always good to get up, to move your body, to, you know, stretch. That's always a great thing. But, you know, if you need a quick break, it's okay to do some mindless activity. It's okay to, you know, I have my silly anagram game. And, and I, and I do that, and it helps relax me. The mind is engaged, it's lightly engaged, and so you can let ideas incubate in the back of the mind. There's the, the great writer Maya Angelou talks about her big mind and little mind, and I, I just love this.
57:35 Speaker 00 She, she says that her big mind was used for her deep thought. And she really, you know, was challenged and put in a lot of effort in her writing. It didn't come easy for her. She, she said she wanted to strangle the critics who said that the writing came easy. But then she had what she called her little mind, which is when she pulled back, took a break. Relaxed, for her it was crossword puzzles and it helped her replenish. And so, you know, if you look at a lot of great scientists and writers, they all have their kind of rote activity that they do that helps them replenish and regenerate.
58:18 Speaker 00 And one of my favorites is the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said he got his best ideas when he peeled potatoes. That was his rote activity, right? You're lightly engaged, right? Otherwise you'd cut your finger. But, you know, it enabled him to kind of, his mind could still churn. He could think of ideas and he was doing something very rote.
58:43 Chris Williamson? You know what my favorite thing is? So when I take breaks, if I've been in here for too long, I go outside and it's usually beautifully sunny in Austin and I've got a tennis ball and I just throw a tennis ball against a wall on a, it's called a slack block. It's like a slack line, but you can transport it. So it's like a wobbly board that you stand on and I can just throw that against a wall and I am lightly engaged, but not too much. It's not too challenging. It's a tennis ball against a wall. I could have done it when I was five. But one of the concerns that you could have when we're talking about, okay, so light engagement, bit of enjoyment, don't be bored, that's your break. The problem of using social media as that is that social media is so tempting and the
59:24 Chris Williamson? rabbit hole goes so deep that the break becomes greater than the amount of time that you just worked for, that you're taking a break from. So you spiral down and doom scroll for the remainder of the hour.
59:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, totally agree. And this is where it's so important for people to develop agency over their actions so that they can control the amount of time that they spend on these kinds of activities, especially social media. So people need to become more intentional in their activities. And you can become more intentional by probing yourself, right? When you, when you have this urge to go on social media, you probe yourself and ask yourself, why do I need to go there now? Is it because I need a break? Is it because I'm bored? And, okay, it's fine. You can give yourself permission to go there. But when you're there, continue probing yourself.
1:00:19 Speaker 00 Am I still getting value out of this? What kind of value am I getting? And, you know, am I, am I replenished? You know, do I feel it's time for me to go back to work? And then get yourself back on track. But you have to keep yourself aware of what your actions are so that you have more control over that. Another thing that you can do is to practice forethought. And here's what I mean by that. Is to understand how your current actions can affect your life downstream. And the, the best timeframe is later in the day or at the end of the day. And so if you're going to go on social media
1:01:02 Speaker 00 and you know you're someone who can spend an hour there or longer, practice forethought and say, before I go there, what's my day going to look like? Am I, am I still going to be up working on that deadline at 10:00 PM? Or am I going to be relaxing with a glass of wine, reading a book, watching my favorite show? What's my life later in the day going to look like? So practice thinking of your future self when you have that urge to go on social media.
1:01:33 Chris Williamson? You and David Goggins, one of the hardest men on the planet, Navy SEAL and ultra marathon runner have the same idea. So he calls it the one second decision. And with the one second decision, he plays forward what happens if he decides to do this right now. So he uses the example of SEAL selection and he's on the beach in California in freezing water. And he is tempted to ring the bell. He wants to leave. He wants to get out. He wants to quit. He thinks, what happens if I go and do that? Well, I'll be warm, but I'm going to be warm in five days in any case. It's only five days, hell week. So.
1:02:12 Chris Williamson? What happened? I go up, I ring the bell, then I get warm, then I go to bed. What do I feel like when I go to bed tonight? Well, racked with shame and guilt and insufficiency. And the same thing goes for this. The best question that I asked myself and I got everyone that listens to the show to ask during COVID was, what would have had to have happened by the end of lockdown for you to look back on lockdown and consider it a success? And what I love about the idea of forethought toward the end of the day is, for the most part, when you get distracted and when you do a distracting activity like going on social media, you are optimizing for pleasure in the moment, which will cause you discomfort in the long term. What you're doing with the
1:02:56 Chris Williamson? forethought exercise is you're reversing that. You're allowing some of that future pain to get front loaded into this decision making process right now. So it's no longer as hidden. I think that's very, very good.
1:03:08 Speaker 00 That's right. Exactly right.
1:03:11 Chris Williamson? What about how someone should design their day if they want to maximize their focus? You know, most people, most days are relatively similar, relatively routineized, or at least weeks are same stuff, same sort of time. If you were to design a day to maximize focus, what would you do?
1:03:31 Speaker 00 Yeah. So first of all, it turns out that we found that people have rhythms over the day for when their focus is at its peak. And, you know, most people have peak focus late morning, around 11 a.m. and mid to late afternoon, 2 to 3 p.m. And there are individual differences. If you're an early type, your peak focus is much earlier in the day. If you're a late type, it's much later. So this is just what's representative of most people. So one of the first things you can do is to design your day to schedule those tasks that are going to be
1:04:15 Speaker 00 the hardest, that require the most thought, the most creativity, to schedule those around your peak focus times. And, you know, for goodness sake, don't, don't spend that time doing social media or doing email, but use it for doing work that really requires mental effort because you've got those resources at that time. And this kind of rhythm, you know, it, it ebbs and flows and it's, you know, coincides with our mental resources. We, you know, gather up our mental resources and then we, you know, expend them. And, you know, you take a nice lunch break where you can get yourself replenished, you
1:04:56 Speaker 00 eat, eat well, then you can ramp yourself up again and be ready to do focused work. Now, you should not schedule things back to back without a break. It's, it's just not good. And we tend to think that. That's the way scheduling has always been done. Let's, let's pack the most we can into the shortest amount of time, put ourselves on this tight schedule so we can finish. And I want us to reframe the conversation and I want us to think about putting our well-being first. Because if we put our well-being first, we will be productive along the way.
1:05:37 Speaker 00 And that means also scheduling in important time for breaks, for meaningful breaks. And I call this negative space. Uh, you know, before I, I got into science, I actually was trained as an artist. And when you, when you do a, a painting, you think of, of course, the, the figure you're creating, but also the space around that becomes very important. That space frames the figure and it sets it off. And if you are familiar with the sculptor of Henry Moore, you know, that's also an example.
1:06:15 Speaker 00 He's a, a, a British sculptor or, uh, most, most great artists and sculptures or even Japanese gardens make use of this idea of negative space surrounding the rocks in a garden.
1:06:31 Speaker 00 Let's translate that into our day, right? We've got hard work we want to do over the day. But we want to also schedule in time that can maybe proceed and follow this hard work where you can replenish and you can use that time, you know, whatever works for you. Right? It can be contemplation, can be taking a walk in nature, can be doing some road activity, but schedule that in and consider that as important as the tasks you're doing because that that negative space or empty space in the day is going to help your performance shine.
1:07:16 Chris Williamson? Also importantly, those negative spaces should not be filled doing social media.
1:07:22 Speaker 00 Well, if it's probably not a good idea to to fill them with social media. I agree.
1:07:31 Chris Williamson? What else have we missed? What else in terms of strategies that move the needle the most for people's attention or focus haven't we got down?
1:07:41 Speaker 00 So we talked about sleep, intentionality, meta-awareness.
1:07:47 Chris Williamson? Well, what about blood sugar level? What about, have you looked at the the relationship between foods that people eat and the attention?
1:07:55 Speaker 00 So I I have not looked at that in my research. I do know that when people have a sugar crash, it affects their attention, even though I've I've not looked at that in my research.
1:08:09 Chris Williamson? Okay. And then you also talk about like this agentic sovereign view. And it seems like the word is is almost like intentionality. Right? What what am I doing right now? Is this the thing that I'm supposed to be doing? Creating that meta-awareness, being able to see what's going on?
1:08:27 Speaker 00 Exactly. Yes. And that's and I do believe that people can develop a skill. For for this type of meta-awareness, it might seem hard at first. You know, I observe people in my research and I'm a professional observer of people's behavior. And I learned to become a professional observer of my own behavior. And I did it through practice. I believe it's a skill that anyone can create, can develop. And it becomes second nature. You're probing yourself and it just becomes second nature. And it becomes a habit for you. And then it enables you to become more intentional. Whenever you have an urge to go to social media,
1:09:12 Speaker 00 you probe yourself, it's second nature and say, why do I need to go there?
1:09:19 Speaker 00 Uh, there, there is another thing we could talk about, which is we, we talked about solutions at the individual level. But I also think that there can be solutions at the collective level. So I, you know, when it comes to electronic communications, you know, I talked earlier in the show that people, you know, have to respond to the demands in the environment. And if anyone simply cuts themselves off from, you know, email and Slack and communications, they actually penalize themselves, especially if you're in the workplace, because they're, they don't have access to important information.
1:10:00 Speaker 00 And so I believe that organizations need to come up with a solution. For example, you know, you can, some companies have email free days and that's shown some promise. Uh, you can shrink the window of time for when electronic communications are sent. So, you know, we've, we've tested batching, which means sending email out, you know, beginning of the day, middle of the day, end of the day. Unfortunately, we don't find that it moves the needle, doesn't make people feel more productive or less stressed. But people do average checking their emails 77 times a day. And I do think that if email is batched, at least people wouldn't be checking it seventy
1:10:45 Speaker 00 seven times a day, they might check it three times a day.
1:10:48 Chris Williamson? Yes, as a collective, that's going to be difficult because as soon as one person breaches that, you now have a cascade of emails coming in.
1:10:57 Speaker 00 Well, you can turn off the the server, the email server.
1:11:00 Chris Williamson? So that's a hard stop. Yeah, pull the switch.
1:11:02 Speaker 00 The hard stop. You know, another thing we can do is I'm very interested in this notion of right to disconnect laws.
1:11:10 Chris Williamson? France.
1:11:10 Speaker 00 And I, France has it, Ontario has policy, Ireland has policy, believe it or not, New York City tried to introduce a right to disconnect law and.
1:11:25 Chris Williamson? Stupid idea.
1:11:26 Speaker 00 They had, they had a council meeting was very interesting. Most businesses argued against it. And one of the most interesting arguments was from the Bureau of Tourism that said, the reason why New York City is the number one tourist attraction is that we're the city that never sleeps. And therefore, you know, workers should should not turn off. But, you know, a right to disconnect law would would not punish individuals who who choose not to answer electronic communications after work hours. It helps people detach from work. And if you can detach from work, you know, it gives you a break, gives you
1:12:10 Speaker 00 a chance to replenish. It's good for people's well being. And as a result, it helps people more effectively reattach the next day.
1:12:21 Chris Williamson? Element, which is one of the shows, the sponsors on this, on this podcast, they do three weeks on, one week off for every employee. One problem being that if there's something urgent that needs during doing on the Monday of that one week, tough luck. On the Saturday, on the Saturday after the Friday of week three, it's a painful nine day wait to get a response from anyone. And there's no one in the office. So that's an extreme version of it. But yeah, I think you're right. On a collective level.
1:12:53 Chris Williamson? We are individuals, hairless apes, trying to battle back against the most powerful algorithms in history and billion-dollar companies with the smartest data scientists on the planet powering them.
1:13:05 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:13:06 Chris Williamson? It's not quite a fair fight at the moment. And all of the, any legislation that we can have put in, I think that assists us to disconnect is probably a smart idea.
1:13:15 Speaker 00 I, I, I agree. But you know, it's ultimately people, we, we have created the internet, we contribute content, and I really think people have the power to make change.
1:13:26 Chris Williamson? Dr. Gloria Mark, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out the stuff that you do, where should they go?
1:13:32 Speaker 00 They should go to my website, which is gloriemark.com, all one word. And then you can learn a lot more in my book, Attention Span.
1:13:43 Chris Williamson? Linked in the show notes below. Gloria, I appreciate you. Thank you.
1:13:47 Speaker 00 Thank you so much for having me.
1:13:48 Speaker 02 Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.
1:14:05 Speaker 03 What would happen if I stopped drilling? You start, you freeze to death, that's what.
1:14:09 Speaker 02 With great power comes great deniability.
1:14:13 Speaker 03 I'm not the first man.
1:14:14 Speaker 02 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.
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