Technology and Ever-Falling Attention Spans 147
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC has an article about technology's effect on concentration in the workplace. They note research finding that the average information worker's attention span has dropped significantly in only a few years. "Back in 2004 we followed American information workers around with stopwatches and timed every action. They switched their attention every three minutes on average. In 2012, we found that the time spent on one computer screen before switching to another computer screen was one minute 15 seconds. By the summer of 2014 it was an average of 59.5 seconds." Many groups are now researching ways to keep people in states of focus and concentration. An app ecosystem is popping up to support that as well, from activity timing techniques to background noise that minimizes distractions. Recent studies are even showing that walking slowly on a treadmill while you work can have positive effects on focus and productivity. What tricks do you use to keep yourself on task?
Close The Other Stuff (Score:2, Interesting)
It sounds stupid, but it works for me. When I really want to concentrate on one thing, I kill everything else. Any browser tabs I have open that don't relate to what I'm doing, my email client, remenants of other stuff I've been working on lately. Sometimes I throw my ear buds in but have no music playing (they do a good job at passive noise cancelling). I also clear off my physical desk. I'm pretty keen on scribbling notes while I work.. so my desk is usually full of sheets of graph paper. Sounds lame, but
Re:Close The Other Stuff (Score:5, Funny)
tl;dr
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Came here to say this, pleased that it is so near the top.
Re:Close The Other Stuff (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Close The Other Stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't bring myself to close tabs. I find myself with my hand shaking over the 'x' in the browser like a junkie trying to flush his last hit down the toilet. What if there's a comment that's really interesting? Or, worse, what if someone is wrong on the internet? What if I want to re-read that article? How will I find it again? I opened up that Stack Overflow page for a reason. I better leave it open until I remember what it was. Of course I can't close the gmail tab, what if there's an important email. Better leave twitter up because, reasons. Any new articles on Reddit? Oh, yeah, that was that Medium article I meant to read. Let me finish up writing this comment on Slashdot.
Most tabs shouldn't be closed (Score:2)
I can't bring myself to close tabs.
I tend to let tabs accumulate unless I need the resources. Restart the browser in a few days. The cost of searching for the right information again is generally higher than the cost of leaving the tab open.
I do wonder what percentage of this has to do with the age of the person involved. I find geeks in their 20s tend to read less for fun when compared to geeks in their 40s, with geeks in their 30s may or may not. Reading requires a longer attention span and *may* have some correlation with context-swit
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The cost of searching for the right information again is generally higher than the cost of leaving the tab open.
I often reach a point where the cost of searching for the right tab is higher than the cost of searching for the right information again... :/
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You're doing it wrong. You are abusing the concept of multiple tabs as a history and/or bookmarks bar and/or todo-list.
If you're really interested in keeping some pages around for a longer time than a couple of hours, just bookmark the fuckers. Or copy-paste the link onto your todo-list. Keeping a shitload of tabs open is a terrible way of maintaining a 'to read' or 'to process' list. I used to do exactly that, but stopped doing it when I lost my set of opened tabs one time too many due to some crash (and s
Re: Most tabs shouldn't be closed (Score:1)
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Ctrl-Shift-T will reopen all previously-opened tabs after your browser crashes. (Works in Chrome; I believe in works in Firefox as well).
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Yes, they added that functionality after I'd made the switch. In the end, I'm happy the crashes made me switch. My new strategy has really taken away a lot of mental load. It's undoubtedly personal, but all those open tabs staring me in the face and constantly either asking my attention or asking that I ignore them in my visual field was simply stressful.
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The problem with using bookmarks and stuff is that's it's extra maintenance overhead. Sure, if there's a page I keep referencing, I'll bookmark instead of Googling for it again each time (though I have no qualms about that either).
But if I'm in the middle of reading something and I get interrupted and don't get a chance to go back for a few days, or if I think it's important (a link say), but I don't quite have the time for it yet, or if I have it on auto-refresh for the updating content (/. article, or for
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Remember, the only information you need is the URL.
Only if the URL makes human-parseable sense, or if I recognize the URL and know what's on the page. The tab title, page layout, colors, etc act as mnemonic devices.
Yet you spend 80MB, valuable screen estate and tab switching space, just to be reminded of that one simple string.
80MB is nothing, and tab groups are great for categorizing open tabs. Firefox and Chrome will both restore previously-open tabs after a crash.
Call it abuse, or not. It works for me.
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I wish there were an option for browsers to release the resources for any tabs I haven't accessed in say an hour. Keep the URL but release the page and reload when I revisit, it's only the URL (and title) I care about. Maybe leave the option to flag a tab as "never release" if I expect notifications from it.
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So, an addin something like UnloadTab [mozilla.org]?
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Great, thanks for both. I use both Firefox and Chrome.
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What's your concept of "one thing"? The "one thing" in my job requires about a dozen different screens in nearly as many applications, and I'm not going to close and re-open them 30 times a day.
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What's the actual point of it all? Why is "keep yourself on task" considered to be something worthwhile? My life is more enjoyable when I'm not 100% focused on one single task. Maybe the company wants me on task, but Slashdot is not asking "how do you keep your slaves busy?" but is instead asking us about how we voluntarily work against our own self interests.
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Or disable the wifi.
Hurts, but really works.
None - I'm a frequent commenter on SlashDot. (Score:5, Funny)
>> What tricks do you use to keep yourself on task?
None - I'm a frequent commenter on SlashDot.
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I exactly do the opposite: I never comment on Slashdot.
I MUST WORK! (Score:1)
What tricks do you use to keep yourself on task?
Until few days ago i used to not have a Slashdot account...
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Me either...
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Why that's a crock ... (Score:5, Funny)
I just simply don't believe that ... oooh, shiny ... oh, gotta do my timesheets, it's Friday.
What was I saying?
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To be honest, I find a pending meeting to be a bit distracting, and kind of find it annoying when people do exactly that. You've already interrupted me to tell me about the meeting (even if electronically), and now I'm going to be distracted thinking about it until it happens. May as well just ask your question now and get it over with the way I see it.
Different things for different folks I guess.
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Well, daily standup (or end of day.. ) I actually do like, as long as they are _actually_ short.. it's more the "stuff that just came up" type stuff I'm talking about.
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() I've found my group appreciates my coming by once a day to go through a list rather than multiple drop by's in a day.
I do agree with this, and prefer working with lists (action items, whatever).
But there are areas like emailed questions where you're almost certain if you ask two separate questions in the same text, you'll get only one reply, and even worse : your correspondent will be honestly certain he *did* react, no?
Re:Yup (Score:5, Informative)
You'd drive me insane. I don't mind a quick drop by. It frees you up if you're blocked, allows for some human interaction, and if I'm too busy I'll just say no. Now put a meeting on my calendar and the 15-20 minutes before it is totally lost, as I avoid starting anything anticipating the meeting. Just come and talk to me.
Not to mention that unless you have a good rapport with your manager a 1:1 is a huge cause of stress. Its a "oh shit, what' the matter now" issue, especially if a non-regular one appears on my calendar.
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Interesting, my developers say they prefer to stay in the zone focused and instead have a scheduled time. It is interesting how different people have different preferences.
And yeah, rapport is important to me, so I doubt I am causing stress, but I will keep it in mind. Sometimes what we perceive is not reality.
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Attention span? (Score:1)
Sorry, the summary of the article was TL;DR.
tl (Score:2)
dr
Happened to me (Score:5, Funny)
They switched their attention every three minutes on average. In 2012, we found that the time spent on one computer screen before switching to another computer screen was one minute 15 seconds. By the summer of 2014 it was an average of 59.5 seconds.
I know my average has plummeted over the years; especially when I bought a second display, and then a third.
Fortunately, this year I may replace them all with a large 4k display [philips.com.au] and then I'll have a long attention span again.
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I know my average has plummeted over the years; especially when I bought a second display, and then a third.
Fortunately, this year I may replace them all with a large 4k display [philips.com.au] and then I'll have a long attention span again.
DON'T DO IT. or if you do, please put it into landscape mode next to the other monitors, in a circle. i had a large wide-screen display (big mac) - 24 in. i thought it was wonderful. i sat in front of it for 4 years, at a distance of about 1 metre. now my eyes are "prism", meaning that anything over 3 metres away i see *DOUBLE*, especially if it is off to the left or the right. but anything that is exactly 1 metre away, i see perfectly with extremely fast reaction time.
time and time again it has been
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Genuinely curious, because I'm not quite following -- can you explain a little more about your suggestion?
I understand you're saying your eyes became accustomed to a specific distance. And I'd think you were going to follow that up by suggesting to use multiple monitors as a way to add displays at varying distances.
But I can't understand how your suggestion helps. Placing multiple monitors in a circle just means placing them side-by-side at a roughly constant distance from your head (i.e. the radius of th
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Your eye muscles are fine. What degrades is your lenses. That is why corrective optics and laser surgery work. Like the Hubble they adjust the optics of light going in to clear up errors
You blink to to wash away dirt but with organic lenses you also have to replace the cells themselves. Cells don't always replicate properly.
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Parts of our eyes do degrade with age. There are various things that happen, but our lenses get stiffer with age in a fairly predictable progression, so we lose the ability to see clearly at various distances. If you're over forty, you almost certainly need some sort of varying correction, which may mean using reading glasses, or bifocals, or setting one eye for distance and one for closer work. Other reasonable common problems are cataracts (the lenses themselves become opaque), or macular generation (
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My optometrist showed me a little trick to fix this problem.
Once a day take something like a pencil or bit of paper with writing on that you can focus on. Holt it at arms length and slowing move it towards your face, staying focused on it. Do that five times, once a day, or whenever you feel you need it.
After a week or two my vision got a lot better and I found I could focus on far away things much more easily.
Just maybe? (Score:4, Insightful)
Delicious irony (Score:3, Insightful)
(Yeah yeah, I know, maybe they're in a different time zone... I would bet money the majority are still in their working hours. Including myself.)
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I do a lot of fiction writing (no, I'm not talking about earnings reports) and I do three things to focus.
1. I don't work at home. There are too many distractions. (I realize this isn't relevant to office workers, generally.) I prefer a place like the University library where it's quiet and there are study carrels.
2. I use a distraction-free writing environment. (I created one for EMACS but there are things like FocusWriter etc.) This is similar to the close-all-tabs idea, I suppose.
3. I use the Pomodoro te
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Whatever happened to, "Oh, there's the chirp that means I got a text--maybe I should check my phone after I finish what I'm doing right now"?
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Or use a DE that has multiple desktops. I've been wondering for years why anyone needs more than one physical screen. I think it might be some e-peen thing, maybe.
We all unconsciously know this (Score:5, Interesting)
This is another one of those "we need empirical data to prove what everyone already knows", like studies on the differences between men and women, how peoples behaviors are affected by wealth, etc;
We can chalk it up in the "no shit sherlock" category.
FTFA:
This is perhaps because there is relatively little research available about the impact of websites like Twitter and Facebook, or games like Candy Crush, that seem to be deliberately aimed at keeping us constantly engaged, to the detriment of work.
I have to don my tinfoil cap now and surmise that in all liklihood, it isn't in the best interest of Google, Facebook, Apple or the rest to point out that yes, using our "products" and living this fast and loose, jittered-stimmed out existence of tweets, posts, statuses, etc isn't in your best interest, even if your best excuse is the usual "but this is how I stay current with my family" [youtube.com]
What we are creating ladies and gentlemen is a generation of people who will HAVE TO HAVE computers and AI run things for them, because their attention span and critical thinking will be in the toilet.
Removing my tinfoil cap...
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See! It's happening!
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Amusing Ourselves to Death [wikipedia.org]
Good book on the matter.
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I've already posted in this discussion, so somebody please mod parent up. (And read the book if you've not already.)
Attention span (Score:2)
Ritalin. Does the trick for me. I started taking it at about 40 yo and it made a world of difference in my ability to pay attention to things; and therefore, to hold jobs much much better.
Go outside and play! (Score:2)
Haven't we all heard our mom's yell this at us?
How many people actually have any appreciable time away from technology in any given day anymore?
Our cars have radios, touch screens, navigation, and are interactive and immediately present when we sit down.
Our homes are filled with tablets, desktops, phones, and TVs with DVRs--so no more waiting through commercials even--we get *exactly* the stimulus we want *now* when we want it.
Seems we just inundate ourselves with stimulus.
Challenge: walk outside and sit on
Kill me. (Score:1)
This whole thing reads like some dystopian society's instruction manual. "hmmm these workers aren't focusing fast enough according to our stop watches, lets play droning sounds and make them walk on treadmills, maybe pump them full of drugs to keep those meat machines operating at peak efficiency until they burn out and can be replaced." Kill me now if this is our future.
I use two monitors (Score:4, Insightful)
Something seems off about this... (Score:2)
An app ecosystem is popping up to support that
There's just something wrong with that statement in regard to "increasing focus" and "decreasing distractions". I'm having trouble putting my finger on just what seems off to me...
Think of it as evolution in action. (Score:2)
'Nuff said. The folks able to keep up with rapid attention shifts will survive. Those who take longer? They'll die sooner and breed less. Pretty soon, we'll "evolve" to the point where we'll al ride around in personal mobility units with our view of the real world is through a single sensor protruding in front of us, after which it'll be a short step to fully enclosed climate controlled pods.
Then, when our evolutionary perfection is achieved, we can crush The Doctor and destroy all other imperfect sentient
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'ride around in personal mobility units with our view of the real world is through a single sensor protruding in front of us'
So, just like all the people in WALL-E ?
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Could someone summarise the article for me? (Score:2)
It's a bit long to follow.
Music (Score:3)
I've found that listening to music can help. If my brain needs to switch focus for a second, it can listen to the music for a few seconds and then go right back to the task at hand. What kind of music works best varies from person to person and even day to day. Some days, I need slow songs to help calm me down. Other days, I need a more "active" song to boost my adrenaline.
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I have the same reaction to music. When people come and address me I mute the music. I'll start working again and realize I'm not focused. I then unmute the music and everything goes to normal again.
A lot of it depends on your environment when you were growing up. If you always focused without music around there is a chance the music will have the adverse effect. Because my parents always listened to music I figure I must have gotten use to that.
There was two studies that I found interesting which I tried t
Interesting work makes focus easy (Score:4, Interesting)
What tricks do you use to keep yourself on task?
I know that this trick isn't possible for everybody, but I find that actually working on something interesting leads to far fewer distractions. When I'm working on something I like, I don't care when a new email arrives and I don't have any interest in hitting Slashdot. (I am not working on something interesting at the moment.) Difficult work (either mentally or physically) also seems to makes it harder to get distracted.
Maybe people's jobs are just getting more boring and cluttered with seemingly worthless tasks.
Researchers also have low attention span (Score:2)
Why, I was looking at some researchers the other day, and they kept switching tasks 4 times per minute. First they're playing with their watch, then they get distracted by all the interesting stuff I'm doing, then they're back to playing with their watch, then they're writing something down. Maybe if they stayed focused they could write more than one line per minute!
Maybe tasks take less time now? (Score:2)
Just maybe, a task that took three minutes on a computer in 2004 now only takes 59 seconds? Nah.
Ignore my manager.... (Score:1)
Simple, stop the IM, Email, and walk-up spam. (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh don't know, but if I could, you know, work through a ticket to completion without interruption, that would be great!
* Boss promotes too many tickets at once to the same priority. Meaning you work 3,4,5 or more tasks at the same time with similar time tables.
* People with tickets given a lower priority IM you again and again, and you keep telling them they are a priority 2 or 3... And until all the p0 and p1's are gone, you'll never even get a chance to look at it. Take it up with the boss if you want a
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Boss promotes too many tickets at once to the same priority.
When everything is top priority you have complete freedom since you can work on whatever you want and still be doing the right thing.
must be stopped (Score:2)
How can I focus on browsing /. with a limited attention span?
It's not just at work (Score:2)
(Disclaimer: I'm the guy with 6 browser tabs open right now who _should_ be finishing something.)
I think that in the workplace, simple demand on knowledge workers' time is the reason for loss of focus. Fewer and fewer people are being hired to do things, and at the same time more things are being asked of the remaining individuals. I often find it hard to sit and actually solve a problem completely unless people leave me alone and let me work on the one or two hard problems. The thing that does keep me moti
Not the worker, the task (Score:1)
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For instance, our auditing team doesn't just have to audit documents, they have to create a folder on this drive, copy a document from that drive, email a copy to this person, cc that person.
Sounds like a good automation project if I ever heard one.
No tricks at all (Score:2)
Just quit emailing, IMing, phoning, txting, and calling impromptu meetings and my productivity will skyrocket.
And now /. has given me a chance to vent on my late lunch. :)
/etc/hosts (Score:1)
tl;dr (Score:1)
start important things on paper? (Score:2)
I know it may sound absurd, but whe I have a really important synthesis to prepare, be it the mail-to-CEO, strategy-in-six-slide-for-the-team, last-time-to-convince-this-guy I start it with a pencil on paper. ;-) but I almost never come back to it))
How many points, in which order, oh I need to mention that there, no, earlier
And when my draft has become reasonably illegible, I can trash it and start typing, I know exactly what to do.
((in fact, to be honest, Idon't trash the paper before I'm done typing
Time tracking (Score:1)
Attention = physical environment + reward - risk (Score:1)
Define "change screen" (Score:2)
If you're using a form-based application that pops up a new form for each segment of data entry vs. a tab-based interface that switches panels for each segment of data entry, are you "changing screens"?
The reason I ask is that I've noticed in increase in the number of form-based applications with the advent of the smart phone interface. People don't want to have to tap a tab/button at the top or side of the screen to move to the next segment as had been convenient to do with a mouse. So the "screens" h
Ob XKCD (Score:3)
This [xkcd.com] is very apropos (assuming that's the right URL; I can't test this at work).
To preserve my attention span (Score:2)
A good night's sleep, frequent breaks, and rest periods. Whenever I switch to a new task, I methodically clean up after the last one - close terminals, browser tabs, diagnostic programs, everything. Sometimes interruptions are avoidable, and I have to open a ticket for something, but I make the quickest note possible so I can get back to my task right away.
comment subject here (Score:1)
How about the demands? Interruptions, "hey can you do this too", "we need you for [meeting/explanation/event]" and all the constant "This is now also on your plate, deal with it.", which appending "whenever" doesn't make much better re: attention span.
It's not even the most painful of iterations among the increasing expectations of workers.
Computers got faster over ten years... (Score:2)
I don't see how they controlled for equipment getting faster. A computer in 2004 was probably a ~3Ghz Pentium 4 with a 800MHz bus and 1Gb of RAM. Now you have an i5 or i7 with an SSD that's probably 10 times faster. People just don't wait that long for their computer anymore.
(I miss the good old days when a print job got you a 15-20 minute break.)
We are seeing the burgeoning... (Score:1)
What I do (Score:1)
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This is why I work at home about 95% of the time. I occasionally go to the office to say Hello to people, without any illusions that I'll actually get anything productive done there.