‘Weird and Daunting’: 7,000 Readers Told Us How It Felt to Focus

A new study reveals that regardless of task difficulty, people’s minds increasingly wander with time, reaching a 50% distraction rate towards the end of activities. Analyzing over 10,000 participants in 68 studies, the research found no significant difference in distraction levels across various tasks. This phenomenon persists even without external... See more

Gloria Mark, a professor of information science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Attention Span,” started researching the way people used computers in 2004. The average time people spent on a single screen was 2.5 minutes. “I was astounded,” she told me. “That was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.” But that was ... See more