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107 reviews for:
Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity
Gloria Mark
3.51 AVERAGE
107 reviews for:
Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity
Gloria Mark
3.51 AVERAGE
I heard Gloria Mark speak about the book on the Ezra Klein podcast. The book treats attention as a resource that depletes with use and can be replenished through rote activities, exercise, and the like. Mark identified several myths about attention: that focused activity is the end goal of our attention, that "flow" is how this is best understood, that rote activities are wastes of time/resources/energy, and being prone to distraction is a personal failing.
On the contrary, Mark argues that the end goal should be a balanced life, focused on overall wellbeing with focused, productive work as a component of overall wellbeing. But focused, productive work is unlikely to arrive at a state of "flow" for the contemporary intellectual (read as white-collar) workforce, with the possible exception of computer programmers. Rather, it will be a series of starts and stops, interruptions, and feeling drained from the cognitive load of switching tasks and focusing intermittently.
In this kind of environment, activities that restore one tank of attention, Mark argues, are essential to overall wellbeing. Those activities include "mindless" (i.e., activities that you can do with little cognitive attention) repetitive activities on devices or physical activities ranging from exercise to routine household tasks (cooking, cleaning, etc.). Yet the challenge with these activities is that they are fruitful in moderation, but advertisers, email clients, and phone app programmers are extremely effective at getting people to spend excessive time on these "mindless" activities. That is to say, it is not a personal failing to behave in ways that are predictable and expected given the aims of these structures/media sources.
Mark's answer for retaining balance with overall wellbeing is to develop agency, and she is following Banduras, a social psychologist here. Banduras, according to Mark, identifies four characteristics that are constitutive of being an agent able to make changes. Those marks are: intention, forethought, self-regulation, and self-reflection.
Intention is identifying your goals. Presumably these could be longer term goals and values, but they could also be daily goals.
Forethought is a practice of visualizing what the results will be if you do or do not accomplish those goals, identifying and thinking about how it will affect you in the future.
Self-regulation is setting up structures to support yourself as you operationalize your goals via forethought.
Self-reflection is an opportunity to reflect on how well you did and to make course corrections, adjusting your intentions, practices and forethought, and self-regulation.
I found this structure to be helpful, and tweaked some of my practices. One change I made was to move my morning focused work time earlier in the day. I think the period of time right after the kids go to school is one of my most productive times of the day. So, I'm trying to maximize that time with focused work. I've set up structures to support that, which include exiting my email client on my computer and turning off notifications on my phone. Another period of time is shortly after lunch. This time, however, needs to be broken up with activities to restore my attention with short walks when I feel my focus diminishing.
Then to incorporate the intention and self-reflection steps, I added a period of time before my focused work time to identify for that day my primary intention (overall in life), my primary work goal(s), and my primary emotional goal(s). Then at the end of the work day, I reflect on how well I accomplished those goals, I evaluate what was conducive to accomplishing them (or what prevented me from accomplishing them), and I determine whether I need to make a change moving forward.
Today was Day 1 for this practice, and it felt splendid. I accomplished my two major work goals, and even has some in the tank to work on a couple of other repetitive tasks or small steps in larger projects. And I met my primary intention and emotional goal for the day.
So, it is important to have hooks and structures in place to support getting out of those activities.
On the contrary, Mark argues that the end goal should be a balanced life, focused on overall wellbeing with focused, productive work as a component of overall wellbeing. But focused, productive work is unlikely to arrive at a state of "flow" for the contemporary intellectual (read as white-collar) workforce, with the possible exception of computer programmers. Rather, it will be a series of starts and stops, interruptions, and feeling drained from the cognitive load of switching tasks and focusing intermittently.
In this kind of environment, activities that restore one tank of attention, Mark argues, are essential to overall wellbeing. Those activities include "mindless" (i.e., activities that you can do with little cognitive attention) repetitive activities on devices or physical activities ranging from exercise to routine household tasks (cooking, cleaning, etc.). Yet the challenge with these activities is that they are fruitful in moderation, but advertisers, email clients, and phone app programmers are extremely effective at getting people to spend excessive time on these "mindless" activities. That is to say, it is not a personal failing to behave in ways that are predictable and expected given the aims of these structures/media sources.
Mark's answer for retaining balance with overall wellbeing is to develop agency, and she is following Banduras, a social psychologist here. Banduras, according to Mark, identifies four characteristics that are constitutive of being an agent able to make changes. Those marks are: intention, forethought, self-regulation, and self-reflection.
Intention is identifying your goals. Presumably these could be longer term goals and values, but they could also be daily goals.
Forethought is a practice of visualizing what the results will be if you do or do not accomplish those goals, identifying and thinking about how it will affect you in the future.
Self-regulation is setting up structures to support yourself as you operationalize your goals via forethought.
Self-reflection is an opportunity to reflect on how well you did and to make course corrections, adjusting your intentions, practices and forethought, and self-regulation.
I found this structure to be helpful, and tweaked some of my practices. One change I made was to move my morning focused work time earlier in the day. I think the period of time right after the kids go to school is one of my most productive times of the day. So, I'm trying to maximize that time with focused work. I've set up structures to support that, which include exiting my email client on my computer and turning off notifications on my phone. Another period of time is shortly after lunch. This time, however, needs to be broken up with activities to restore my attention with short walks when I feel my focus diminishing.
Then to incorporate the intention and self-reflection steps, I added a period of time before my focused work time to identify for that day my primary intention (overall in life), my primary work goal(s), and my primary emotional goal(s). Then at the end of the work day, I reflect on how well I accomplished those goals, I evaluate what was conducive to accomplishing them (or what prevented me from accomplishing them), and I determine whether I need to make a change moving forward.
Today was Day 1 for this practice, and it felt splendid. I accomplished my two major work goals, and even has some in the tank to work on a couple of other repetitive tasks or small steps in larger projects. And I met my primary intention and emotional goal for the day.
So, it is important to have hooks and structures in place to support getting out of those activities.
funny
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reflective
medium-paced
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Ironically, I found this book difficult to pay attention to. The first two chapters were interesting and the next to last chapter had some useful tips, but most of the middle will read like old news is you’ve spent any time reading about the attention seeking algorithms of tech platforms.
challenging
informative
slow-paced
informative
medium-paced
informative
medium-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
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challenging
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inspiring
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medium-paced
This felt necessary when I passed it on display at the library...and I have low impulse control so I picked it up. lol... In seriousness though, I don't know that I had enough attention span to read this. It's theoretical, memoir-heavy, and filled with lots of research anecdotes. It's all good and true and we're too addicted to multi-tasking and dopamine and all the things, but I would have preferred a book with more tangible action steps or personal growth stories. There was lots of interesting pieces, but it never felt cohesive...but maybe that's because we're not actually happier in a focused state of flow so the author prevented us from hitting that while reading...
Interesting things I flagged:
Chapter 5:
Self-interrupting was a new term to me, but certainly not a new concept. I'm always self-interrupting to fill time, because I have a habit of checking my phone, or attempting to resolve my train tracks brain or trying to minimize other distractions. Self-interrupting is a bit of a release valve to cope with stress - switching from focused attention to rote attention.
Interruptions caused people to do a task faster than when not interrupted. External interruptions seemed to cause people to go quicker and communicate more succinctly, perhaps to compensate for interruptions they anticipate (proactively working faster when you have to leave early) - tasks with frequent interruptions may also be easier to remember and thus easier to resume in between interruptions. Stress is the cost of the efficiency of working with interruptions.
Women are more focused and resilient to interruptions when compared with men.
Chapter 13:
Ask yourself: While I read, say a news story, have I already learned the gist of the story? Am I still learning something new and interesting? If I keep at it, will I just experience diminishing marginal returns? If so, then I stop...This prevents one from getting too deep into the sunk cost attention trap where it's psychologically hard to pull out - [I read this and thought, "huh...should I stop reading this book now?" But actually, I think I am training my attention by continuing to choose active engagement when I'm naturally losing interest rather than just trying to get the quick hit. I think the author advocates for this theoretically in other parts of the book, but I can appreciate her point here too]
Create friction to make it harder to be distracted - leave a phone in another room, in a drawer that is locked. Expectations of easily getting to a distraction are being revised as you increase this friction.
Interesting things I flagged:
Chapter 5:
Self-interrupting was a new term to me, but certainly not a new concept. I'm always self-interrupting to fill time, because I have a habit of checking my phone, or attempting to resolve my train tracks brain or trying to minimize other distractions. Self-interrupting is a bit of a release valve to cope with stress - switching from focused attention to rote attention.
Interruptions caused people to do a task faster than when not interrupted. External interruptions seemed to cause people to go quicker and communicate more succinctly, perhaps to compensate for interruptions they anticipate (proactively working faster when you have to leave early) - tasks with frequent interruptions may also be easier to remember and thus easier to resume in between interruptions. Stress is the cost of the efficiency of working with interruptions.
Women are more focused and resilient to interruptions when compared with men.
Chapter 13:
Ask yourself: While I read, say a news story, have I already learned the gist of the story? Am I still learning something new and interesting? If I keep at it, will I just experience diminishing marginal returns? If so, then I stop...This prevents one from getting too deep into the sunk cost attention trap where it's psychologically hard to pull out - [I read this and thought, "huh...should I stop reading this book now?" But actually, I think I am training my attention by continuing to choose active engagement when I'm naturally losing interest rather than just trying to get the quick hit. I think the author advocates for this theoretically in other parts of the book, but I can appreciate her point here too]
Create friction to make it harder to be distracted - leave a phone in another room, in a drawer that is locked. Expectations of easily getting to a distraction are being revised as you increase this friction.