Pod Insights The Ezra Klein Show Tired? Distracted? Burned-Out? Listen to This. About this episode I’m convinced that attention is the most important human faculty. Your life, after all, is just the sum total of the things you’ve paid attention to. And we lament our attention problems all the time: how distracted we are, how drained we feel, how hard it is to stay focused or present. And yet, while there’s no shortage of advice on how to improve our sleep hygiene, or spending, or physical fitness, there’s hardly any good information about how to build and replenish our capacity for paying attention.
So for the start of the new year, I wanted to have a conversation with Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, author of the book “Attention Span,” and one of the few people who’s deeply studied the way our attention works, how that’s been changing, and what we can do to stop frittering our attention away.
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You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Ezra Klein? From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.
0:22 Ezra Klein? Hello, and we are back from the holiday break. So before we begin today, we have a couple of open jobs on the show. One, a researcher role, which will be central in our political and policy coverage in 2024, which is going to be a big politics and policy year, and an associate engineer role, who will be helping to engineer the show, making this whole thing happen, making it into actual audio that sounds good. If either role seems up your alley, you can find the links to them in our show notes. But today, I like to begin every year by doing some shows, not on resolutions, which I don't really tend to believe in, but around some questions that I am thinking about and trying to work
1:01 Ezra Klein? on as we enter into a new year. And foremost in my mind right now is attention. And I think it's foremost in my mind because it is literally foremost in mind. Whatever you are paying attention to is what is foremost in your mind. And I am so convinced that attention is the most important human faculty, that at the end of your life, what was your experience of your life? It was the experience of the sum total of the things that you paid attention to. And yet, we treat our attention so poorly. We dissipate it amid so much garbage. And the modern world is simply exhausting for it. And yet, for all of the specificity
1:44 Ezra Klein? we have when we talk about how to get stronger, or how to run a marathon, or how to work on our sleep hygiene, I actually find that there is very little good information about attention. There's a lot of lamenting it. There's a lot of feeling bad about it. But really good scientifically grounded information about how it works, how it functions, and what we can do to build it, to replenish it, to attend to it, is rare. But rare is not the same as nonexistent. And there are people who study this and study it really deeply. One of them is Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California at Irvine. She is one of the foundational, most significant researchers in the attention field and the author of the book, Attention Span. As always, my email, [email protected] .
2:34 Ezra Klein? Gloria Marc, welcome to the show.
2:36 Speaker 01 Thanks for having me.
2:38 Ezra Klein? You make a, I think, pretty important move very early on in the book. And you say this isn't really a book about productivity, that we tend to bucket attention as a faculty of productivity. And when we don't have enough of it, we worry that we're not being productive enough. I think the first time people begin to hear about attention is whether they're paying enough attention in school. And the problem might be that they're not paying enough attention in school. But you want to think about attention as a factor of well-being. Tell me a bit about that. Beyond productivity, how does attention affect our well-being?
3:14 Speaker 01 Oh, it affects it a lot. I'm trying to reframe the conversation. So, technology was created to enhance our capabilities. We can write faster, we can connect with people faster, we can produce more. A lot of the work that formerly had been done in face-to-face interaction in meetings or going into people's offices, it's now being done at the desktop through email or through Zoom or Slack. There were some studies done in the 60s, 70s, 80s where the researchers followed people
3:59 Speaker 01 around and tracked the percentage of time they spent at their desks. And this was roughly about 30% of their day. In 2019, I did a study with colleagues and we found that people spent nearly 90% of their time at their desks. So on the one hand, we might think it's more efficient, but there's a cost to it, and the cost is our well-being. The cost is stress, and extended use of tech without breaks can even lead to burnout.
4:42 Speaker 01 And so I'd like to turn this conversation around and think about how we can focus on well-being. And there's a psychological theory, it's called the broaden and build theory, that showed that when people experience positive emotion, they actually produce more, they were more creative. And so the upshot is that when we experience positive well-being, we can produce more.
5:10 Ezra Klein? I'm going to be honest about my motivations in this conversation. I don't want to produce more, and I don't want to be more creative. I think I produce enough, and I'm sufficiently creative for my own personal needs. I would like to be less tired. That is what I would like in my life. And it was interesting reading your book from this perspective, because you do talk about the way in which being tired can lead to a reduction in attentional capacity, how people who are more tired, if you track their computer usage the next day, they'll be on Facebook more, they'll be messing around more, they'll be more easily distracted. I see all that in myself. But I also see it the other way, that the more I have to pay attention, the more tired
5:55 Ezra Klein? I become, particularly without breaks. And I really noticed it in parenting, that on the weekends particularly, when I'm spending a lot of time watching my kids, I'm not doing anything physically that active. I'm often sitting at a playground. I took them to the store, we went for a walk, I made breakfast. But I can't ever look away. And the kind of sleep I end up needing to take sometimes in the middle of those days is like no nap I have ever taken as an adult before. It is completely drained, completely exhausted. And it feels to me like an attentional form of exhaustion. I get that sometimes from work, from really trying to focus on something.
6:36 Ezra Klein? So I wanted to hear you talk a bit about that side of it, the ways in which overusing or poorly using attention just leads to exhaustion, which of course then leads to worse attention. But let's focus on the first part first.
6:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, so when we use our attention a lot, like when you're trying to focus on your kids, we're expending our limited and very precious cognitive resources. And the way to think about it is that we start our day with a tank of cognitive resources. You can think about it as attentional capacity. And there's things we do during the day that deplete our attentional capacity, like watching kids, or focusing for a very long time on the computer, or multitasking, shifting our attention fast. There's other things we do that can replenish our resources,
7:35 Speaker 01 such as taking a break, taking a nap, meditating, exercising, taking a walk in nature, I'm a big proponent of that. And so when we don't replenish these resources, they're just drained, and that's why we feel so exhausted. And there's a part of the mind that's called executive function. You can think of it as the CEO of the mind. It helps us make decisions, helps us filter out distractions, helps us stay on track. But when we get tired, when our cognitive resources drain, executive function doesn't work as well as it can.
8:19 Speaker 01 And so we get into this cycle, this downward cycle of getting more exhausted, our executive function can't do the work it should. We become more susceptible to distractions. We try harder to stay on track, to stay focused. And the end result is we get ourselves exhausted.
8:40 Ezra Klein? I think the metaphors in this conversation are important. So over the past year, I've been taking weightlifting more seriously again. And one thing you notice when you get into a real gym rat community of weightlifters is the unbelievable specificity of their language and their thinking around recovery, around exertion.
9:02 Ezra Klein? Around varying the kinds of things you do, right? You know, you might think naively, you know, if you want to get stronger, you go in and you just weight lift as many hours a day as you can and do it again the next day and the next day and the next day. And like, the answer is no, you don't do that. You need rest to differ the kinds of stimuli if you want to make yourself stronger, right? Like, all these different ways of sleep and recover and eat gummy bears after your workout and all these things. And it really struck me how thin our vocabulary and our teaching around attention is. If we do have these cognitive resources that get exhausted, that have rhythms, that need rest, that need to be varied in the kind of stimulus you get, we almost have no way of talking about that. It's like, well, you kind of get tired. And maybe when you get tired, you should sleep if you can, but if you can't, you should
9:47 Ezra Klein? just keep looking at your computer. And it struck me throughout the book that you're sort of framing cognitive resources as more like physical resources that actually have many of the same dynamics of rest and rhythms and so on. So I wanted to hear first if that's a reasonable read.
10:02 Speaker 01 I think it's an excellent analogy. So, you know, I gave a talk not too long ago, and at the end of the talk, this person who sat in the back of the room asked me a question. And she said, can our minds become injured if we exert mental effort for a long time the same way that when we lift weights for a long time, our bodies can get injured? And I thought about it, and I said, yes, yes, we can. Our minds can get injured. It's called burnout. And it's a really extreme form of mental exhaustion.
10:44 Speaker 01 It's when we experience chronic stress for a very long period of time. And in the same way, it takes our bodies time to recover from lifting weights too much or using the elliptical too much, we also need time for our minds to recover from burnout.
11:03 Ezra Klein? When you use burnout, there's a colloquial usage of burnout, right? People say this all the time, "Oh, I'm so burnt out." I think you're saying something different. But what is the difference? What is the difference between saying at the end of a day, "I'm tired and burnt out," and what you're talking about, a kind of cognitive injury?
11:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, I really am talking about something more than just the colloquial sense of, "Oh, I feel burnt out." When people are burned out, there are certain symptoms that they experience. They feel exhausted, they tend to feel cynical about the world, they feel just powerless. And it's very hard for them to pick up any kind of energy to do work. It's really quite a serious condition. It's when we just don't have the cognitive and social resources to deal with the demands in our environment. And so when you're really experiencing burnout, you just can't deal with work, with social
12:05 Speaker 01 life on a day-to-day basis. We just don't have the resources available to do that.
12:11 Ezra Klein? What strikes me about that is it reminds me of a line that was very popular online for a while, maybe is not as much now, but people say it all the time, like, "I just can't. I can't even." I feel like that's a cultural signal of burnout, right? When that becomes such a knowable feeling, "I just have no energy to give this, even if it is an important thing," that it becomes a bit of a meme or a cliche. And so I want to go back to what that person asked you when they said, "Can our minds become injured?" I want to ask, are our minds injured? I think one way of looking at the world we live in is we live in an intentionally sick or stressful society, right?
12:56 Ezra Klein? We've developed a million different things to grab everybody's attention and speed it up, from TV to TikTok, more unnatural light all the time. I mean, we live in a very unusual attentional world for human beings. Kids are getting raised in it, and we have a pretty high rise in mental health issues. And I mean, is there reason to believe that we're already seeing a kind of collective attentional injury?
13:19 Speaker 01 There is some evidence that suggests that. So there was a survey done not too long ago of over 10,000 people. It was done in six countries, including the US. And over 40% of respondents reported symptoms of burnout, the symptoms I mentioned, feeling exhausted, feeling cynical, feeling just powerless to do anything. 40%, that's a really high number. And that suggests to me that, you know, this is something we really need to be thinking about. There is, of course, a lot of reasons that are causing burnout.
14:02 Speaker 01 But tech use is one reason that we can't ignore.
14:07 Ezra Klein? Tell me a bit about that. What is the actual evidence that tech use is driving burnout or that tech use is worsening our attention?
14:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, so let's start with talking about how our scope of work has expanded with tech use. So before email, communications were a lot slower. There were phone calls, there were written communications. But now people have an additional workload on top of their other workload, which is answering Slack messages, texting, email. In fact, we find people check email on average 77 times a day, which is quite a lot. And we know that email creates stress. We know this from studies.
15:00 Speaker 01 I did one study some time ago where we cut off email in an organization for some people for a five-day work week. And without email, people were less stressed.
15:14 Speaker 01 And we measured this empirically with heart rate monitors. We found that their stress went down. We also found that people became more social. They actually walked around and visited people in their offices. And people reported enjoying this experience a lot more. So we know that email causes stress. It's not just correlation, but there's causality there. I've also done a study with physicians. Physicians can get really exhausted. And we found that physicians averaged over an hour a day dealing with their email messages.
15:56 Speaker 01 And they were wearables, which measured their stress. And we found a correlation that the more time on their inbox, the higher was their stress. So we know that duration of email affects stress. You know, another thing is that our devices allow us ubiquitous access to people and information. And as a result, many people work through the evenings. Many people have reported to me of checking their phones throughout the night. People don't get a chance to psychologically detach from work.
16:39 Speaker 01 And when you can't psychologically detach from work, it's a lot harder to psychologically reattach to work the next morning.
17:12 Ezra Klein? You're one of the few people who's actually measured the way and length on which people pay attention to their computers, going back now, I think, 20 years or so. So tell me how that's changed.
17:23 Speaker 01 So usually what studies do is they ask people to self-report how much time you spend. And people are just notoriously bad at estimating time. So we followed people around with stopwatches in the workplace. And 20 years ago, we found that the average attention span was two and a half minutes. And then came along a very sophisticated computer logging software. And we found 20 years later that attention spans averaged 47 seconds on any screen. And this was replicated by other people as well.
18:04 Speaker 01 One study found 44 seconds, another one 50 seconds, but it all averages about 47 seconds.
18:11 Ezra Klein? I'm caught between two reactions to this data, which is one, that it is frightening, and the other, which is, who are these people you're studying who managed to stay on one screen for a whole 47 seconds before clicking over to their email or to Slack or to social media?
18:28 Speaker 01 Well, first of all, remember, it's an average. So sometimes people spend longer, a lot of times they spend shorter. And if we look at the midpoint of the data, the midpoint is 40 seconds. So that means half of all of our observations were 40 seconds or less.
18:45 Ezra Klein? One of the things that struck me in the work you've done is that you look not only at how long we stand one thing, but the path back to that thing. And in your book, you say, "The good news is that we do typically come back to whatever it was we were working on, looking at. When we get distracted, when we take an attentional detour, we come back. But we don't get off the highway and get right back on. We make a couple stops along the way." Tell me a bit about that side of things.
19:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's right. You know, people tend to think, you know, they're interrupted, they do something, and then they come right back. That's not how it works. So people experience a chain of interruptions. You can think of these as nested interruptions. So you get interrupted, then you get interrupted from that, and interrupted from that. And people are working on different tasks, different projects, before they return to that original thing. So from our statistics, we find it's an average of about two and a quarter intervening projects that people
19:55 Speaker 01 work on. So imagine that you have a whiteboard in your mind. And for everything we do, for every task, we need to have a mental model of that task. We need a schema. And so you've got this schema about the task you're working on right now, and then you suddenly switch your attention. It's like erasing that whiteboard and writing the new information you need, the new mental model. Then we switch again, and we keep doing that. Now, I'm not talking about switching between Word and email and Slack, which might be within the same project.
20:36 Speaker 01 And if we're switching screens within the same project, then we're talking about every 47-second switching. But when we're thinking about a larger project, then it comes to about 10 and a half minutes. But the point is, we switch our attention a lot. And this whiteboard analogy, I find to be very, very useful. And the reason is because sometimes when we switch our attention, we might get really caught up in something, like the news. You're looking at the news, and you read about some horrific event, you know, or these
21:16 Speaker 01 days, political news. And then you switch back to your project, and that event stays with you. It's a residue. And it's just like with an internal whiteboard. It leaves a residue. Sometimes you can erase that whiteboard in real life completely, right? You see traces of what was written on it. Same thing happens in our minds. And that residue can interfere with our current task at hand.
21:44 Ezra Klein? This metaphor of the whiteboard and this idea that not all distractions, not all diversions, not all detours are equal is one of the things in your book that has really stuck with me and that I've been paying attention to in myself ever since. And so I want to reflect some of it back to you to see if I understand this right, but also to dig a bit deeper into it, which is... So, OK, let's say I'm at my desk. I'm preparing for an interview with noted attention researcher Gloria Mark. And then somebody comes by and says, "Hey, do you have the time?" And I look down at my phone. I give them the time. And in my experience, I can get back pretty quickly from that. It doesn't really bother me that much. But if I flick over to my email, and over in my email, and this did happen, I have a long and complicated
22:29 Ezra Klein? and somewhat confrontational email about an Israel-Palestine show I just did, say. That calls up in my head. It's like I load the whole mental Israel-Palestine program. And then I look over at my text messages, and there's one from my kid's school about them needing flu shots. And I load the whole logistics and all the things I need to get done program. And then when I try to get back to reading your book, I'm still thinking about that. I'm still composing my response on the Israel email. I'm still thinking about when the flu shots are going to happen. This idea of whether or not you are taking breaks that lead to the loading of new, what you call schemas, and whether you don't, seems quite important. And in the past couple of days, I've been really trying to make sure I take breaks
23:14 Ezra Klein? that don't load these new programs. And I feel like it has been really helpful for me. I feel like it is a pretty big difference, being intentional about when I move my attention onto something else, trying not to pollute it too much.
23:30 Speaker 01 I'm so glad to hear that. And you're exactly right. So there are different kinds of interruptions. Some can be very disruptive. Like, you talked about reading an email that brings up a lot of emotional content. And that can stay with us for a long time, as opposed to, you know, someone interrupting me and asking for my signature on something, right? I can go right back to work because there was no emotional content that was raised. But, you know, reading this email on the Israel Hamas conflict just raises so many associations in your mind.
24:11 Speaker 01 There's the emotions and then you're making all kinds of connections to other ideas. And it's really hard to simply cut off and break away from that and go back to your original task.
24:25 Ezra Klein? The idea that email is stressful, that some of its modern variants like Slack are stressful, I think is pretty intuitive. And yet, something I notice in myself is that the more stressed and tired I am, what I do is I check my emails. And I do so knowing that if something is in it, I am reasonably likely to be more stressed by it than not. And something is always in it. But it'll be some terrible news about the world, or somebody mad at me, or somebody who needs me to do something. And I'm curious about this behavior, because I do think other people have something similar, and I've talked to them about it.
25:10 Ezra Klein? Why, when we need a break psychologically, do we look at things that are not a break? What do you understand is happening there in that kind of addiction to stressful things as a way to relieve stress?
25:24 Speaker 01 It's a great question. So, first of all, this notion of random reinforcement. Every so often, when you check an email, you might get a really, really important
25:39 Speaker 01 Wonderful email, like an invitation to give a keynote talk. And it may not happen very often, and it certainly doesn't happen for all our emails. But it happens enough that it has created a kind of conditioned behavior for us to keep checking that inbox. And this kind of, you know, random reinforcement conditioning is actually the hardest behavior to extinguish in psychology. If you have reinforcement on a regular schedule, like every other email is going to be some really uplifting email. And then the email, those uplifting emails stop, you're going to stop checking.
26:24 Speaker 01 But when you know that these emails will appear randomly, then it's really hard to stop that behavior because you keep thinking, yes, at some point, that invitation is going to come, so I'm going to keep checking my inbox.
26:41 Ezra Klein? I want to talk about the idea of interruptions and why they happen. And one of the studies you did separated interruptions that are external, right? Somebody comes over and asks you for something. And what's called self-interruption. I'm on a task and I've decided to switch over to my email, to my text messages, to whatever. And you found an interesting and, to me, surprising stability in the total number of interruptions, no matter whether they were internal or external in their origination. Can you talk a bit about that research?
27:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was very surprising. You know, we would be shadowing a person and they might be working on a Word document and then for no apparent reason, they suddenly stop what they're doing and they switch to email or they switch to pick up the phone. That's a self-interruption, an internal interruption. And we found when the number of external interruptions went down in one hour, the number of internal interruptions went up in the subsequent hour.
27:56 Speaker 01 It was as though people were just determined to maintain short attention spans. So if the interruptions aren't coming from some external source, people will self-interrupt to keep that rhythm of interruptions going.
28:14 Ezra Klein? But is the issue here our innate ability to pay attention? Or is the issue here a habituation to interruption or to novelty? Or maybe another way to ask it is, do you think that in the sort of pre-digital era, people had the same number of interruptions? Or do you think that our desire for interruption has actually increased? And so now we are self-interrupting more because we have become addicted in a way to that kind of feeling of our attention moving to something more novel?
28:48 Speaker 01 So objectively, the number of interruptions pre-internet has not been measured. So I can only speak about my own sense of what I think is going on. I do believe that people do experience more self-interruptions since the internet came about. Why? It's because people have access to more information and more people than they've ever had before. The big thing that came along in 2007 was the smartphone. And the smartphone allows us to check for information, for messages from people, really
29:32 Speaker 01 in a ubiquitous way, wherever we are. And so that's another reason why I believe we self-interrupt more now.
29:41 Ezra Klein? Interruption is a pretty negatively coded term. And I would say that a big part of your book is trying to understand it more neutrally and trying to put forward the idea that interruptions are not created equal and that there are good reasons for interrupting, and some interruption can actually be good. So tell me about that side of it, the positive side, the healthy side of interruption.
30:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know, some interruptions can be very positive. If our minds are just tired and we need a break, an interruption can be good. It can allow us to replenish, you know, stand up, walk around, go outside. That's a really great form of interruption. Sometimes we need social interruptions. If you've been working by yourself all day, sometimes we just need to interrupt ourselves to be with other people. Sometimes interruptions can allow a tough problem to incubate. So, you know, if you're struggling to find some solution, walk away for a bit.
30:50 Speaker 01 Let your mind take a break. And sometimes when you come back, the answer just appears. It seems self-evident. So there are reasons, there are good reasons why we should interrupt and that interruptions can be beneficial.
31:07 Ezra Klein? This gets to something you talk about quite a bit, which I found intuitive when I thought about it, but I hadn't thought about it much before, which is this idea that attention has a rhythm and the rhythm is different for different people. Could you describe some of that research and work?
31:22 Speaker 01 People tend to think of attention as being a binary state. You're focused or you're unfocused. But when I was studying this, I realized that people can be engaged with things in different ways. You can be engaged with writing a paper, which is, can be challenging, or you're reading difficult material. You can also be engaged with watching a YouTube video or playing a game like Candy Crush, what I call rote activities. You're not exerting cognitive effort. It turns out people are happiest when they do rote activities.
32:04 Speaker 01 And so these are very different forms of engagement. And so we did a study where we asked people throughout the day, for the thing you were just doing, how engaged were you and how challenged were you? This enabled us to disentangle these different kinds of engagement. And we find that if we look at those times when people are engaged and challenged, we find rhythms. We find that there are certain peak times during the day. Generally, we find two peaks for people. There are individual differences depending on your chronotype, if you're an early type or a late type.
32:48 Speaker 01 But, you know, most people have a peak focus time mid morning and then another peak focus time mid afternoon. And this corresponds with the ebb and flow of our cognitive resources. It shows that it's just really hard to have this continuous focus for many hours throughout the day. Instead, we see peaks and valleys of focused attention.
33:17 Ezra Klein? And so let's talk then a bit about healthy breaks or interruptions and less healthy ones. Because in terms of things that changed in my thinking and reading the book, I think it made me more attentive, no pun intended, to the way in which I try to replenish my attention or give it a break in ways that are pathological. If you're working on a difficult project, right, you're focusing and you're trying to focus and your goal for that day is to spend a lot of time in that deep focus, right, doing that difficult work, but you feel your attention flagging. What should you do and what shouldn't you do at that point?
33:59 Speaker 01 Well, the thing you should do is take a break. You know, when you start reading and rereading the same sentence and it's just not making sense, or you're trying to write something, it's just hard to come up with the phrasing. It's time to step back, take a break. And there are different kinds of breaks. If a person has the luxury to go outside and take a walk in nature, that's the best break of all. Because research shows that even just 20 minutes in nature can really replenish people.
34:39 Speaker 01 But you know, a person can also contemplate or meditate. You can have a conversation with someone. But it's also okay to do rote activities. You know, people have reported to me different kinds of rote activities. Some people knit. Some people do play simple, mindless games. One person I talked to said, in his office, he has a screen and he just likes to throw that ball on the screen. And it just kind of allows him to kind of reset and relax. So the great poet and writer Maya Angelou talked about her, her big mind and her little mind.
35:24 Speaker 01 And her big mind was what she used for her deep thought and her creativity. And so that's what I would call focused attention, right? Where you're really being focused and challenged. But she also talked about being able to step away and use what she called her little mind. She did crossword puzzles or, you know, she did small tasks, which kind of allowed her attentional resources to fill back up in the tank.
35:56 Ezra Klein? One thing this made me think about was the ways in which the illusion of productivity is highly prized in today's office culture in a way that doesn't really make a lot of sense. That, you know, if I'm at the Times and I'm tired, what I'll probably do is look at the front page of, of the Times, or I'll start looking at social media, or I'll be in my text messages or something. But, but these are all things that if my editor happened to wander behind me, not that he is watching me like this, but it would kind of look like I'm working or doing things that are akin to work. Whereas if I turned on, you recommend the game Two Dots, which I actually downloaded and did find to be a lovely attentional break.
36:41 Ezra Klein? If I turn on a puzzle game and began playing that for a while, that would look like I'm goofing off at work. If I go out and take a walk, nobody will stop me. But if I said it, people might think it's a little bit weird. That it seems to me, we've sort of been taught that what we then want, if we can't be maximally productive for a period, is to be minimally productive, as opposed to being non-productive to actually create. A break and that this is actually a little bit toxic. It means you're never really recovering.
37:13 Speaker 01 I think that you've nailed it. We've created a culture where we feel very pressured to always be on. So, you know, when people are sitting in front of a computer, that signals to their managers and colleagues that they're working. And it's very important to convey that signal that we're working hard. And it's a badge of honor to be able to work longer than everyone else. And to pull ourselves away signals that we're not working. I read that Wittgenstein claimed that he loved to peel potatoes
37:57 Speaker 01 because he came up with his greatest ideas while he was peeling potatoes. And someone looking at Wittgenstein would say, okay, this guy is not working. He's not thinking, right? He's not sitting in front of a pad of paper and writing. But that was his way to kind of help his mind wander and think of creative ideas.
38:22 Ezra Klein? But doesn't this suggest that in a way that is a little bit hard to explain from an economic perspective, that we have really screwed up modern workplace culture? It seems to me that we imagine productivity almost as if we were watching somebody be productive in a movie. We've created this pressure to always look like you're working, even though we know that is not how at least creative work happens. That seems a little difficult to explain, given that in theory workplaces want people to do their most creative work. And yet it seems very, very prevalent. It's everywhere. Then we've added Slack and email. I mean, these constant interruptions.
39:06 Ezra Klein? And this to me is a pretty consistent puzzle about, you know, the modern industrial organizations. Why are they so poorly built to furnish like healthy attention and deep creativity and focus?
39:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, it really is a great question. I think that managers and decision makers need to be educated, that it's so important to consider employees' well-being. And I think that that's missing from what they're thinking about. That, you know, it's really important to give people permission to be able to take long breaks when they need them, to take walks outside, to have social interactions with other people, to create a culture where people are not penalized for not answering
40:03 Speaker 01 electronic communications after work hours and before work hours, to give people a chance to really detach from work, to restore themselves. It's just not in the mindset, I think, of managers and decision makers. Managers are delegating work to us without considering that people might be exhausted. And they need to understand that sometimes less can be more, that, you know, taking good breaks, healthy breaks, can actually lead people to be more creative and productive.
40:45 Ezra Klein? If a CEO of a large company were coming to you and saying, "What one thing could I do that would be better for the attention of the people who work here?" What would you tell them?
40:57 Speaker 01 Well, I would say that they should institute a quiet time when electronic communications can't be sent, so this resets people's expectations. Knowing that email is not going to be sent out gives people permission to be able to work for, you know, a period of extended time.
41:52 Ezra Klein? It's a new year. And a lot of people in the new year, they decide to go on a new fitness plan. They start a new diet. They try being vegetarian, whatever it might be. And on a lot of these, there is a lot of good advice out there for how to have a holistic plan, right? If I want to figure out how to run a marathon, there are no end of marathon training programs I can become part of. But if what I want to do is have a higher attentional well-being, what does that plan look like? What are the components you would tell somebody to focus on? If they wanted to spend three months trying to treat their attention better, trying to
42:33 Ezra Klein? keep their fuel tank from going as low attentionally, and maybe trying to expand the size of that fuel tank such that it is a bit bigger just in general? Where does somebody start? What is your program?
42:47 Speaker 01 So the first thing I would recommend is sufficient breaks. And there is this expression in Japanese that I found so valuable. It's called "yohakunobi," which is the beauty of empty space. And I was really struck by it. I visited beautiful gardens in Kyoto. It's a very famous, beautiful rock garden. And what struck me was, it was not so much the rocks that were beautiful to look at, but it was also the space around the rocks. It set the stage for the rocks.
43:30 Speaker 01 And I think of this Japanese phrase, "yohakunobi," as a metaphor for thinking intentionally about scheduling in empty space into your day, which could be exercise, could be contemplation, meditation. It's time when you're not doing your hard work, but it's going to set the stage and prepare you for doing that hard work. And we tend to neglect that. Number two, I would think about trying to understand your own personal
44:09 Speaker 01 attentional rhythm. So what are the times that are peak focus for you? Find out your chronotype. Most people know what their chronotype is. If you're an early type, late type, I happen to be a moderate type. And instead of scheduling your day, the typical thing that people do is write a to-do list. You know, here's the things I have to do, and here's the times that I'm going to complete them. Think about it rather as designing your day. Think about when those peak focus times are, and doing work
44:51 Speaker 01 that requires the hardest thinking, the most creativity, make sure you do work at those times, that kind of work at those times, because you'll perform your best. And when you know you're going to be in an attentional valley, that's a time to step away and even schedule a walk outside or exercise during that time. So intentionally design your day. Another thing I would recommend is to practice what's called forethought, imagining how our current actions are going to affect our future selves. When we think about our daily
45:34 Speaker 01 work, what makes the most sense is to think about our future selves at the end of the day. So, you know, if I'm really tempted to read news, because there's so much going on in the news, I will imagine what my end of the day is going to look like. So at 7:00 PM, am I going to be relaxing and drinking a glass of wine because I've finished my work, and I'm going to be feeling fulfilled and rewarded? Or am I still going to be up working on that deadline? And so practicing forethought can help keep us on track in the moment.
46:14 Speaker 01 The last thing I would recommend is thinking about our goals, keeping our goals in mind. Now, you know, this seems self-evident. Of course, we have to think about our goals, but we don't. And, you know, I did a study at Microsoft Research. This was led by Alex Williams. And we had people answer very simple questions at the beginning of the day. What's your task goal for the day? What do you want to accomplish? What's your emotional goal? How do you want to feel today? And by thinking of these questions, it brought their task and emotional goals to
46:54 Speaker 01 mind and helped keep them on track. The effect didn't last very long, and that's because goals slip and they're dynamic. And it's so important for us to keep reminding ourselves of our goals to help keep us on track.
47:10 Ezra Klein? How about for kids, or maybe more to the point, for parents of kids? So something that I worry about is I think that the world my two-year-old and my almost five-year-old are growing up in, it's designed to drive their attention capacity to zero, right? The social media keeps getting faster, TikTok and algorithms. And it's only, I think, going to get worse in many ways with AI. You know, you talk about research in the book, but I think we all know this, that the cuts in movies and TV shows are quicker. Sometimes I try to turn on the old Mr. Rogers for them, and they look at it like, what the hell is this? And then you turn on Paw Patrol or something. And I mean, the speed of cuts
47:52 Ezra Klein? and the vibrancy of colors and like, they're just staring at it open-mouthed. I'm not somebody who believes you can, you know, protect your kids or even should pull them out of all modern technology. I'm not a no-screen time parent. But I do worry about how they're going to build a strong capacity for attention and a rich capacity for attention so that they can enjoy a lot of the things that can only be enjoyed when you can give them that kind of focus and that kind of energy. So I'm curious if this is something you think about or talk about with people. I mean, what would it mean to help kids develop?
48:33 Ezra Klein? Better attention and a better relationship to their own attention in the same way that we try to think about doing that for their physical health or for their, you know, knowledge of the dates of historical events.
48:45 Speaker 01 I worry about this a lot. So executive function, that's the CEO of the mind. It's not yet mature for kids. And it doesn't really mature until kids are around 10 years old. And if it's not mature, kids become even more susceptible to distractions, especially when they're younger. And there was a longitudinal study done in New Zealand that found that, you know, kids who watched TV, the more of that they watched, the more attentional problems they experienced later in life. And so it's important to consider that our children's behavior
49:29 Speaker 01 is really a mirror of our own behavior. And so it's so important that parents be role models for their children. A few months ago, I was in Riverside Park in New York, and it was a beautiful day, sunny day. People were sitting on the park benches. And two people really caught my attention. There was a toddler that was tugging on her mother to pay attention to her. And the mother was just engulfed in her cellphone. And also, just recently, I was in the supermarket. Somebody puts their child into the cart and pulls a tablet
50:13 Speaker 01 out of her purse, gives it to the child. I was in a bus. As soon as the child sits down, a smartphone is given to the child. So children are learning that this is normal behavior. So don't ever put your computer or phone, don't ever put that first before your own child. If your child needs your attention, get off your screen and give your attention to your child. And above all, you know, make sure that you are setting a good example and you're not on your phone on your screen around the clock. Because your children, they pick that up.
50:56 Ezra Klein? I would say this in a way connects to something we talked about earlier, which is, look, I have young children and I am very well read in on not wanting to be on my phone all the time and worrying about my attention and worrying about the example I'm setting. And I'm also often tired and overworked and probably burnt out. And when that is true, and the truer that is, the more likely I am to be on my phone. So this is why to me, the idea of attentional wellbeing and seeing this as a core part of wellbeing is important. Because if you're gassed out attentionally, then just having been scolded by Gloria Mark and Ezra Klein on a podcast about how you shouldn't look at your phone
51:39 Ezra Klein? when your kid is asking you the same question for the 17th time at 5:45 in the morning, and you had a terrible night of sleep, like, that's not going to do anything. You're still going to look at your phone because you want to escape that moment. And the way you're used to doing it is looking at your phone. And I do it all the time, right? The point is not to push this outward. But I do it less if I'm have healthy habits elsewhere, if I slept enough and if I'm not overworking myself badly. And so I think this is part of the importance of seeing it all holistically. In the same way that if I'm lifting with poor form, or getting a repetitive stress injury, then it's really hard for me to pick my kids up, no matter how much I know that they like to be picked up. If I'm treating
52:22 Ezra Klein? my attention poorly, it's very hard for me to pay attention to them, because I've injured my attention. And so to me, like, this is why that that move you make of making this about wellbeing is important, because it is part of living a good life. Having enough attention to give to the people and the things that deserve it is really important. And when we're frittering our attention away on lots of garbage and lots of stuff we don't even really want to be paying attention to, then what suffers are the things that we did not want to suffer, right? The things that we wanted to be present for.
52:55 Speaker 01 Absolutely. You know, the ship has sailed. We're in a tech world. We can't simply cut off from tech. You know, you can't do a digital detox. Well, you can, but then you come right back to the tech use and you're doing exactly the same thing. It's like being on a crash diet. Works for a while and then you come back and start with the same eating habits. So I'd like us to think about how we can be more intelligent about how we use tech so that we're not getting burned out. And, you know, we need to think about preserving our well-being. And, you know, ultimately, I believe we're
53:35 Speaker 01 a lot more fulfilled by the relationships we have off-screen. And, you know, let's not ignore those.
53:43 Ezra Klein? So then, always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
53:49 Speaker 01 So, my first recommendation is The Challenger Launch Decision by Diane Vaughan. So, you know, when we think about our behaviors in this digital age, like checking emails 77 times a day, or checking phones throughout the night, or texting while having a conversation with someone, or using your phone when your kids want your attention, we've come to accept these behaviors as normal. So Diane Vaughan is the person who identified the idea that we slowly accept non-normal behaviors as being normal. So, you know,
54:32 Speaker 01 this book is such a fascinating account and analysis of the Challenger shuttle disaster in 1986. And, you know, when I think of politics, boy, this idea is especially relevant, and especially Trump's behavior. We have slowly expanded our bounds of what is normal. So, you know, her book, it's really a warning to us. My second recommendation is The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis. I love this book because it relates one of the greatest collaborations in the history
55:13 Speaker 01 of psychology between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. So Kahneman and Tversky had very different personalities. And it wasn't just their friendship, but it was also their conflicts that just led to some of the greatest insights in the field of psychology. And my third recommendation is The God Equation by Michio Kaku. I love this book because it conveys Kaku's just sheer awe and wonder of physics. And you know, you learn about so many strange things, wormholes and time travel. And if I had read a book like this before I went to college, I might have wanted to
55:58 Speaker 01 study physics.
55:59 Ezra Klein? Gloria Mark, thank you very much.
56:03 Speaker 01 My pleasure.
56:16 Ezra Klein? This episode of The Ezra Clangio is produced by Claire Gordon, fact checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Christina Semilowsky and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser, and special thanks to Pat McCusker.
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