Attention Span by Gloria Mark

This book came with a rather bold subtitle - “A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity”. In it, author Gloria Mark refers to some rather rather in-depth time studies she has done to discover when and how people are getting distracted. My interest was piqued when she calls out the state of being in “flow"" (a term that comes from one of favourite books) as a bit of a productivity myth and not realistic for many office workers who have to do a lot of busy admin-type work.

The second point that further piqued my interest was Mark’s claim that actually, spending your time doing non-productive things like scrolling social media (which she calls “rote attention”) is not actually a bad thing.

One might think that if you are not able to achieve a flow state due to the nature of your work that you should try and restructure your job in such a way that you can have more flow time. Instead Mark accepts that it’s quite possible that you like your job how it is, and you don’t really need that flow state at all. She backs this up with some time studies where at certain times people would be asked to rate their current sense of happiness. The study found that people were happier when doing things that require rote attention rather than focusing on a task - i.e. shopping online instead of focusing on their work. Scrolling social media or doing an online crossword brings quick gratification, while people tend to be stressed while working.

Mark also refers to some findings where this seems to apply with face-to-face interaction versus spending time socialising via Facebook. People report being happier the more time they spend on Facebook instead of with social interactions. It’s not quite clear, but it seems to imply that they measured this as checking Facebook at work vs having a (possibly work-related) social interaction with a coworker, so I’m not really sure if that’s a fair comparison.

The book loses me somewhere in the middle - it did a good job of hooking me at the beginning with the mention of Flow, and how social media scrolling isn’t always a bad thing, but I didn’t feel like it quite smoothly flowed from Mark’s initial claims through to what behaviours we can change to reach this “Groundbreaking Way” like mentioned in the book’s title.

Mark wraps the book up by suggesting that it’s totally fine to not be 100% productive all of the time - it’s not at all realistic. And that it’s good for your brain to break periods of focused work up with periods of time spent on rote attention tasks like Facebook scrolling. Of course you shouldn’t be doing this all day though, so you need to learn how to get off Facebook once your break time is up.

Oddly though, she’s against the idea of using internet blockers, and instead suggests that people should learn the skill to “self-regulate” and find the willpower to not browse distracting sites on their own. I really don’t agree with this, and considering she still suggests doing things like putting your phone in another room, or locking it in a drawer, this basically feels like the same thing as using a blocker?

Overall, I agree that it is not realistic to expect to be in a period of hyper-focus all the time and it’s good to give yourself these downtime periods. But at the same time, giving yourself permission to scroll on social media (especially without internet blockers) seems like a trap and even if the studies say that it makes you happier in that moment, I’m sceptical that it actually leads to more satisfaction in your life in the long run.

My personal takeaway from this book would be that instead of social media, it’s time to find other “rote attention” activities that you can do in these downtime periods instead (doodling? knitting? reading a chapter of fiction?) that can provide you with some personal satisfaction, but with less detriment to your life.