You may have noticed that it’s becoming harder and harder to focus on a single task for more than a few minutes at a time. This is likely due to our constant exposure to digital distractions, our increasingly busy lives, and our tendency to multitask. In fact, a new study published in the Journal of Health and Wellness, that WyzOwl covered has found that the average attention span in 2023 is just 8 seconds. That’s a significant drop from the 12-second attention span reported in a similar study conducted in 2000.

In fact, with the rise of short-form content like Facebook Videos & TikTok, where you watch summaries of 2-hour movies within a minute, it becomes super addictive to just swipe down to view the next minute-long video. With the increased rate of content consumption, the quicker your attention span shrinks.

According to Dr. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how digital media impacts our lives. In her new book, “Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity,” Mark explained how decades of research has tracked the decline of the ability to focus.

In 2004, we measured the average attention on a screen to be 2½ minutes. Some years later, we found attention spans to be about 75 seconds. Now we find people can only pay attention to one screen for an average of 47 seconds.

Gloria Mark, PhD, of the University of California Irvine

Listen to the full podcast by Gloria Mark, PhD on APA.org

Not only do people concentrate for less than a minute on any one screen, but when attention is diverted from an active work project, it also takes about 25 minutes to refocus on that task.

In fact, our research shows it takes 25 minutes, 26 seconds, before we go back to the original working sphere, or project

It has been known for years now that multi-tasking is a myth. The human brain takes time to re-align back into a task, even if you switch between only two tasks. More often than not, when you multi-task, it’s at least upwards of three to four different tasks as a time. As predicted, Mark’s research has also shown that as we got distracted to work on project two, we are also interrupted on project three, and move on to project four.

“And then you go back and pick up the original interrupted project,” Mark explained. “But it’s not like you’re interrupted and you do nothing. For over 25 minutes, you’re actually working on other things.”

“However, there’s also a switch cost,” Mark added. “A switch cost is the time it takes you to reorient back to your work: ‘Where was I? What was I thinking of?’ That additional effort can also lead to errors and stress.”

Mark went on to add that “With the exception of a few rare individuals, there is no such thing as multitasking”. With the exception of subconscious tasks, ” like chewing gum or walking, you cannot do two effortful things at the same time.”

For example, she said, you can’t read email and be in a video meeting. When you focus on one, you lose the other. “You’re actually switching your attention very quickly between the two. And when you switch your attention fast, it’s correlated with stress,” Mark explained.

In this article by Sandee LaMotte, CNN, Mark explains how to get your mojo back.