Behold, the 47-second workday (and how to get your attention span back)

If you’re like most people who spend hours in front of a screen each day, you may have noticed your attention span isn’t what it used to be. It’s not just your imagination (unless your imagination is already three tabs away). Gloria Mark has the data to back it up. A professor of informatics at UC Irvine, Mark has spent over two decades tracking digital distraction. In 2004, the average knowledge worker stayed focused on a screen for about two and a half minutes before switching tasks. By 2012, that window had shrunk to 75 seconds. In her most recent lectures, she’s updated that figure once again—to just 47 seconds.

That metric captures more than just our relationship with our phones. It signals a deeper shift in how we work. Today’s knowledge economy fosters what Mark calls “attention fragmentation,” or a relentless toggling between tasks, tabs, and tools. And the impact has had a massively detrimental effect on our productivity, both in and out of the workplace.

“Smartphones arrived in 2007, and [after that] social media exploded,” Mark says. “All the while, so much of our shopping shifted from stores to screens. Nearly every part of life moved online, pulling our attention in more directions.”

A fair amount of Mark’s research, detailed in her 2023 book Attention Span—and continued in her Substack newsletter The Future of Attention—isn't exactly optimistic about our attention dilemma. But it’s not fatalistic either. Her current focus is on whether we can rebuild a more deliberate relationship with the tools we rely on to get stuff done. The good news? She believes it’s possible—if we first understand how distraction works, where it comes from, and how our tools shape it.

Take the average chat tool, adopted by companies to streamline communication. “They were meant to simplify work and organize communication—and do, by sorting conversations into channels,” Mark says. “But every new project spawns a new channel, and suddenly you’re juggling dozens.”

Often, for all of those dozens of communication hubs, each channel has its own rhythm and unwritten rules of engagement. Switching between them—no matter how small the task—takes effort. “It demands constant attention, encourages rapid responses, and still requires cognitive effort to navigate: figuring out who’s included, what’s been said, and what you’ve missed,” Mark says.

In other words, these tools work exactly as designed—until they don’t. “It’s helpful in some settings, like fast-paced software teams,” Mark says. “But sometimes a tool like that adds as much noise as clarity.”

Tools that think with you

As part of her research, Mark looks at how tech shapes our attention. Lately, that includes testing AI tools designed to ease cognitive load. But, importantly, she doesn’t view them as autopilot.

“I see [AI] more as a collaborator: useful, but only if I stay actively involved,” Mark says. In her own work, the moment she stops thinking critically about what AI is producing, her mind begins to drift.

This ties into broader research around interruption timing. For years, scientists have studied how to detect natural break points in a person’s workflow, or moments when a ping won’t completely derail their concentration. They’ve tested everything from tracking keystrokes and eye movements to pressure sensors in office chairs. Most of those systems and ideas never made it out of the lab. 

“It’s a hard problem,” Mark says. And the technical challenges are weighty—but the principle holds: timing matters more than we realize.

Well-designed future systems could learn to wait for natural transitions in someone’s work, or signal when your attention has already started drifting. Instead of yanking you out of deep focus, technology could eventually work with your attention, not against it.

“You train it by asking: Do I really need to check the news right now?” Mark says. Another example? Finding yourself re-reading the same sentence from the same page of that book you’ve been staring at for a little too long. 

By interrupting these impulses, we can transform an automatic response into a conscious choice. And conscious choices, repeated over time, can become intentional habits. “That moment of probing turns a reflex into a decision,” Mark says.

Mark herself has a system for engaging meta-awareness when this happens: “I pause, reset, and put down the book. It’s a way to protect your cognitive resources before they’re drained.” Eventually, catching yourself in these moments becomes automatic.

Cognitive drift will always return, but Mark says we can strengthen the muscle to be able to recognize when it’s happening. Seeing it is the first step toward changing it. In an attention economy built on fragmentation, awareness itself becomes our most valuable resource.