Yes, Your Attention Span Is Shrinking. Here’s How to Change That

This was created by a robot that I fed with language (Midjourney).

Tiktoks, YouTube shorts, Instagram reels. A flash, a splash, a here look at this, look at this, look at this, check your email, here’s a DM, bling, beep, bop, boop. Modernity has a lot for us to get distracted by.

What does that mean for humanity?

Well, according to CNN in early 2023: studies say as a whole our attention span is decreasing. Dr. Gloria Mark, author of Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity, said that in 2004, the average attention span when looking at a screen was two and a half minutes. That shrunk to 75 seconds and is now a depressed 47 seconds. In twenty years, the average attention span when looking at a screen has dwindled by almost two whole minutes to less than one minute. Ouch.

It gets a bit worse. Dr. Mark also relayed that it takes about 25 minutes and 26 seconds to refocus on a work task where your attention was previously diverted from. In terms of switching work projects, people spend about 10 1/2 minutes before they get interrupted by themselves or an outside source and then switch to another project.

This seems eerily close to how I sometimes work when I’m writing articles in my free time (on Medium, I have 184 drafts and 45 published articles), and before I started this article, I…