Do You Have the Attention Span of a Puppy?

Social media are easy to blame, but the truth is more complicated.

Photo by Lucija Vukušić on Unsplash

I have been beating myself up for several months about my undisciplined work habits. When I buckle down and concentrate, I can achieve a week’s worth of writing in two full days. But finding that concentration is difficult, and more often a week’s worth of writing takes the whole week. In between spurts of productivity, I spend an inordinate amount of time scrolling through social media.

My favorite time suck of late is video clips on Facebook – mostly episodes of cop shows and medical dramas, with a sprinkling of standup comedians and scenes from romcoms of the past three decades. I am an easy target because I never watched much television, so I eagerly gorge myself on these short bits to see what I’ve missed. Whenever I decide I’ve earned a short break from work, I open Facebook, and when I look up again it’s an hour later.

Thalia Toha, a writer and CEO of a business consulting firm, observed that scrolling social media “resembles a Las Vegas casino’s coin-operated slot machine.”  Her statement accurately captures how scrolling feels to me: A pleasant distraction on the brink of becoming an addiction.

“The attention economy” is a label bandied around to explain the social media environment. A more accurate label would be “the distraction economy,” and it applies to more than social media. How hard is it to sit down for 60 minutes of concentrated work? Too hard! “In our research,” says Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, “we find that people check email on average 77 times a day.” Though I seldom get telephone calls these days, I look up every time I do. And each time a ding announces a new text message, I drop what I’m doing because it might be from a family member, and texts tend to need immediate answers.

The problem is just that – the expectation of quick answers. Back in the day, we wrote letters and were happy if they were answered within a week. A telephone call was a treat. A long-distance call meant someone had died. Advertisers addressed us in 60-second commercials. Today it’s hard to imagine a world in which communication could have been so slow. Letters have yielded to email messages, and we are annoyed if they are not answered in 24 hours. People who are too busy to write email send texts (or tweets), and a one-hour response time is an interminable wait. Commercials are now 15 seconds or even 6 seconds. In movies and television shows, the average length of a camera shot is 4 seconds.

Whether these realities are in response to shorter attention spans or causing them is hard to determine. But without question, our attention spans are measurably shorter than they were as recently as 20 years ago. In 2004, the average attention span on a computer screen was two and a half minutes (150 seconds), according to Mark’s research. By 2012 it was 75 seconds. The most recent studies peg it at just 47 seconds.

The Multitasking Fallacy

Some will argue that they don’t need a long attention span, since they are efficient multitaskers. The preponderant weight of scientific evidence on multitasking strongly suggests that argument is a load of crap.

“We have fallen for an enormous delusion,” says writer Johann Hari,  author of Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention. Careful research shows that when people think they are doing several things at once, they actually are switching back and forth between tasks. Each switch requires time to refocus on where you left off. Although you may feel you are performing in top form on multiple tasks at once, the research tells a different story: When focus is interrupted by switching – to another task or to respond to a text – performance slips about 20%. Mark says studies show a correlation between frequency of attention shifting and stress, including higher blood pressure. Frequent switching also leads to more errors and slower performance.

It’s Not All on You

 If you are having trouble staying focused, there are definitely things you can and should do to improve personal performance. But understand that it’s not all on you. “This isn’t happening because we all individually became weak-willed,” writes Hari. “Your focus didn’t collapse. It was stolen.” Strengthening your powers of concentration or swearing off all social media might help you, but the problem isn’t you; it’s systemic.

Hari quotes former Google engineer James Williams saying that personal growth “is not the solution, for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn’t the answer to pollution…it’s not sustainable, and it doesn’t address the systemic issues.” It’s not helpful to blame the individual when “it’s the environmental changes that will really make the difference.”

Hari argues that “we need to band together to take on the forces stealing our attention and take it back.” It’s a worthy goal, but I have to wonder just what we can accomplish in 47 seconds.