Center for Humane Technology | Your Undivided Attention Podcast Episode 7: Sorry for the Interruptions Gloria Mark: We carried around stopwatches, and we timed every single activity that people did to the second. Tristan Harris: That's Gloria Mark. Back in 2004, she convinced a random sample of office workers to essentially ignore the clicking of her stopwatch as she timed their every move. Gloria Mark: They turned to their email. That would be start time. Click on the stopwatch. Then they'd turn away from email. That would be stop time. Click on the stopwatch. We recorded all these things, so we could be as precise as possible. Tristan Harris: Precision mattered because Gloria wanted to know exactly what people meant by the word multitasking. Remember, this was the early 2000s at the height of the multitasking craze, but it was a totally vague concept. I mean, just how many tasks did the average worker juggle? What is a task? It was anybody's guess until Gloria and her colleagues answered the question with scientific precision. Gloria Mark: And we found that people switched actions about every three minutes. That's not just what they're doing on the computer, but what they're doing on the phone and interacting with people. At the time, this was 2004, people were shocked that it was three minutes. They thought that was a very short amount of time. Tristan Harris: Three minutes of uninterrupted attention by today's standards is remarkably long. I mean, it's luxurious. Gloria Mark: The most recent statistic we have is back from 2016 where people's attention on their computer for any screen, the median length was about 40 seconds. Tristan Harris: 40 seconds before your attention breaks. It takes an act of extreme self- awareness to even notice all of these hairline fractures. When our attention breaks so chronically and so pervasively, we're not even noticing the full toll that it takes on us. We need a researcher like Gloria Mark with her stopwatch to measure the problem with precision. Over the past 15 years, she's created a whole new set of methods to trace our cursor movements and our eyes and even our heartbeats as we work. Tristan Harris: On today's show, Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California at Irvine will share her latest findings from the science of interruptions. The symptoms are shocking, but they shouldn't be. I mean, we're all experiencing it, and for the sake of our sanity, we have to stop pardoning the interruptions. I'm Tristan Harris. Aza Raskin: And I'm Aza Raskin. This is Your Undivided Attention. Aza Raskin: We're surrounded by distractions and yet they're invisible to us. I want to know how did you start noticing this thing we can't notice. 1 of 14 Center for Humane Technology | Your Undivided Attention Podcast Episode 7: Sorry for the Interruptions Gloria Mark: The trigger was a cultural change that I went through. Whenever I do research it's always inspired by some kind of personal experience. I moved in the year 2000 from Germany where I had been living for some time back to the US. When I was in Germany, there was a common practice that you would go out to lunch with your colleagues, and then we would take a walk around this campus. It was a beautiful campus. It's called a round. You'd just take a round. Then you get back to work. Gloria Mark: I come to the US, and it was all I could do to buy a sandwich between my classes or between classes and a meeting. Rush back to my office, and sit in front of my computer and eat my lunch. As I walked down the hall, all my colleagues with their doors open were doing exactly the same thing, because we just didn't have the time to do all these things. I really, really began to wonder to what extent do other people experience this? That's how I became interested in distractions, interruptions, multitasking. Aza Raskin: Are there a lot of people besides you working on just measuring and seeing what's happening to our attention? Gloria Mark: There are some researchers. I wish there were more. I find this topic to be so profound and so important. I just wish that there would be an entire field around this topic. It's not just computers though. It's just a wider spectrum across society. I was just recently looking at statistics on television viewing, and there's something called the average shot length or median shot length. I found a site that had tracked these shot lengths over the years, and it's actually quite short. It's amazing. Gloria Mark: Actually I'm looking at this graph now, and I see that, if we're looking at average shot length, it was about 13 seconds in the 1950s and the last year they have is 2010, and it's probably about three and a half seconds. Tristan Harris: Wow. Gloria Mark: Similar things in films. It depends on the director. But the shot lengths also seem to be decreasing. So, we're getting bombarded from all directions. I'm not sure of the cause and effect. I'm not sure if people are being trained to have short attention spans from TV and films and then applying it to computers, or if their short attention spans have developed from computer activity, but I will say that when people go on a computer we have access to more information and more people faster than we ever have had in history. That just feeds into the natural curiosity of humans. Tristan Harris: Was it in one of your studies you mentioned ... I know that there's probably a more recent stat now, but how many hours information workers spend in their email? Gloria Mark: People average about 74 times a day checking their email, but each time they check their email, they spend about 32 seconds on average. You could imagine all these interruptions that are happening throughout the day, checking the 2 of 14 Center for Humane Technology | Your Undivided Attention Podcast Episode 7: Sorry for the Interruptions email and spending this amount of time, and then having to reorient back to work. I remember the high person in our sample checked it 435 a day. Tristan Harris: Wow. Aza Raskin: Oh my god. Wow. I'm really curious. What happens in that moment that you get distracted, or you self-interrupt. You go to your email. What does the process look like to get back to what you were doing? Gloria Mark: Well, people have to cognitively reorient where they were, and this is an extra cognitive load because you have to recall, for example, where you were if you're working on a document. What was your train of thought before you got interrupted, and I want to mention one thing that I think is very relevant. We looked at types of interruptions, and we tend to think of interruptions as only coming from external identifiable sources like email notifications, or social media notifications, but about half of all interruptions are due to one self. We call these self interruptions. Tristan Harris: Half of interruptions are coming from the inside. Gloria Mark: From the inside, so the way to explain it is that you're observing someone and they're typing in a Word document, and then for no explainable reason, they suddenly stop and they check email, or they stop and they pick up their phone, or they stop and they just look up something on the web, which may or may not be related to what they're doing. Tristan Harris: I found this part of your research on self interruptions profound, because you have a theory about how these external interruptions beget internal or self interruptions. Gloria Mark: Yes. We had looked at the data, and we divided the data into hourly segments. We had collected a fair amount of people because we're tracking them over multiple days and the frequency of what we call external interruptions. That's from say, email notifications, some external source, and we looked at the frequency of what we call self interruptions. We find that when the external interruption frequency wanes, its very interesting. The internal interruptions tend to kick in. It's as though people are just habituated to being interrupted. To having these short attention spans, and if the interruption is not coming from some external source, then people self interrupt. Aza Raskin: One of your studies you cut off information workers from email for five days. What happened? Gloria Mark: Yes. We did. We had people walking around the office wearing heart rate monitors. We measured them for a week, and we got their average stress experience and the next week, email was cut off, and when email was cut off, people because significantly less stressed and focused significantly longer. The flip side of focus is looking at switching between screens, and people switched about half as frequently as they did with email. One might think, "Oh yeah, you 3 of 14 Center for Humane Technology | Your Undivided Attention Podcast Episode 7: Sorry for the Interruptions take away email. Of course, you're going to switch less." Not necessarily because email is just one source of switching. Gloria Mark: The way I interpret this is that people have this habit of checking email.