Attention spans are plummeting as desk workers juggle incoming pings, beeps and social media distractions. Is tech destroying our focus – at work and at home? By Sarah Catherall.
When Philly Powell went on holiday, the then HR adviser at Chorus did something almost radical. Rather than sending an out-of-office automatic reply, she told those who contacted her that their emails would be automatically wiped. “Thanks for your email, I’ve deleted it, I’m on holiday. If it is urgent, please get back to me after [this date],’’ she wrote.
Wellington-based Powell is part of global moves to try to get control back over the pings, notifications, multiple screens and screeds of emails and messages flying back and forth in the workplace. Technology was supposed to aid our jobs and our lives, but a growing body of research shows it is having the opposite effect – it is exhausting us.
According to an extensive study by Gloria Mark, a US psychologist and professor of “informatics”, workers check their emails on average 77 times a day. Mark has spent thousands of hours studying people in the workplace over the decades, and has come to some harsh conclusions, which she reveals in a new book, Attention Span: Finding focus for a fulfilling life. Her conclusion? People are overworked and exhausted because they have to deal with too much information and too many messages.
In 2004, we could hold our attention on a screen for 2.5 minutes. Almost two decades later, that time has slumped to 47 seconds before we are distracted by something on another screen, she says.
The biggest culprit amid the alerts and notifications interrupting our workday is email. Even though workplaces are increasingly using other communication programmes such as Slack and Teams, the University of California, Irvine, academic says her research has found a direct correlation between email and higher stress loads. “Email has become a symbol of work,’’ she says.
In Europe, countries such as Portugal, France, Belgium and Ireland are taking employee wellbeing a step further by passing legislation giving them a right to switch off after work hours. Employers and managers are barred from sending emails or messages to employees when the working day is deemed to be over. It is a controversial move, but a policy that some are in favour of here.
According to the Public Service Association, non-sworn police staff and Police Association employees also introduced an employment clause allowing workers the right to disconnect.
PSA national secretary Duane Leo says the change means supervisors and managers have to respect employees’ right to disconnect outside of work hours, and to leave devices at home if they wish to. The digitisation of workplaces means that work is increasingly creeping into home life, exacerbated by hybrid working.
“We hear a lot about the ‘always on’ culture and that can be very intense, especially for managers. There are people who can worry that if they draw boundaries, that will have a negative impact, or that if they “switch off” they might miss something,’’ he says.
A policy like “the right to disconnect” can change habits, and Leo hopes it may filter into other workplaces.
Last year, Hays Recruitment found almost four in 10 staff liked the idea of mandatory disconnection, based on a survey of 1500 employees in New Zealand and Australia. Its managing director of recruitment and workforce solutions specialists, Adam Shapley, says 667 managers and 847 employees were surveyed; 6 per cent already had a right to disconnect policy, 39 per cent wanted one, 18 per cent didn’t like the concept, and 23 per cent did not think it would work in their organisation.
Shapley believes that Covid and working from home led to high burnout, and since then, organisations have tried to put boundaries around work outside office hours. “Employee mental health and wellbeing became a priority and most organisations took steps to protect staff, like ensuring they logged off at a reasonable time,’’ he says.
Two changes are driving the desire to disconnect: the skills shortage, and the growing number of Millennial and Gen Z employees who want work-life balance and choose organisations that provide it, he adds.
Powell agrees. She has since left Chorus to found a company, Wellbeing Tick, which, among other roles, sets out to help organisations manage their technology use.
“We carry our office in our pockets,’’ says Powell. “Everyone needs to have uninterrupted breaks but it’s becoming less and less uninterrupted. We need to empower people to know they don’t need to be connected 24/7, especially on holiday. The world is not going to blow up if you can’t be contacted.’’
In a survey last year of 2000 employees working at different organisations she coaches, Powell found technology overload was the third-biggest stress in the workplace, behind workload and burnout. Referring to her email deletion, which she talked about on LinkedIn, she says, “Everyone hates coming back from holiday to hundreds of emails in the inbox. I think people thought: ‘How genius!’ It’s tackling the issue head-on – ‘Shock horror, she’s deleted my email’. But two weeks after leaving the office to go on leave, you’ll find that the issue you were emailed about has often progressed, so there’s no point contacting you about that.’’
Mark doesn’t believe in going cold turkey and having a digital detox. She refers to times when she has had a forced digital detox, such as when she stayed at her mother-in-law’s house and there was no Wi-Fi.
I tell her I have had only a few, and they’ve also been involuntary – most recently when I went tramping with a group of girlfriends and there was no Wi-Fi or cellphone coverage. For a day or so, I felt a sense of panic, and then adjusted to being cut off from the outside world. But as we walked off the track on day three, our phones started pinging, and we spent the entire bus trip back to the airport catching up on the messages we had missed.
Mark nods. “A digital detox is not a permanent solution. It’s like going on a crash diet. We have to develop a new relationship with technology. The ship has sailed; we live in a technological world.’’
Flipping faster
In her research tracking people’s attention spans, Mark has followed groups of knowledge workers aged 25-50 in different organisations. In 2004, she watched them go about a typical day at the office. Using a stopwatch, she noted every time they switched tasks on their computer, moving from a spreadsheet to an email to a web page and back to the spreadsheet. She found they averaged just two and a half minutes on a given task before switching.
In 2012, she repeated the experiment, and found the average time had dropped to 75 seconds. Most recently, between 2016 and 2021, she noted the average time had slumped to 47 seconds. Why? Participants described their reasons for flicking: boredom, habit, feeling overwhelmed by a task, checking in with friends or family, avoidance. One referred to their constant checking in on social media as “snacking’'.
“People often talk about flipping from work mode to distraction mode; one person described it as having ‘two selves’,’’ she writes.
Not only do people concentrate for less than a minute on any one screen, Mark says, but when they divert attention from an active task, it takes about 25 minutes to refocus on that project.
People spend about 10.5 minutes on a work project before they are interrupted – either by their own distraction or by someone else. But they don’t go back – they switch to another work project, and this switching also sees them lose precious time.
Stress effect
The employees Mark observed were trying to multitask and their blood pressure rose and heart rates sped up. They also became tired, made more mistakes and were consequently less productive.
As part of her study, Mark lobbied for six years to find an organisation willing to let her cut off email for some workers to see what happened to their stress levels. She followed the employees for three days while they had free access to their emails. On day four, their email was shut off and they wore heart-rate monitors. They could still meet with colleagues or receive phone calls. They often still tried to check their email, but on day five, most broke the habit.
The result? Participants could concentrate for longer and switched their attention less frequently. “The fact that people could focus for longer shows that email does cause attention spans to decline. But perhaps the best result was that without email, the heart-rate monitors revealed significantly less stress by the end of the week,’’ she writes.
There was a social benefit, too – they replaced any digital interactions with face-to-face chats, and walked to other floors and buildings to interact with colleagues.
Mark also shuns the idea that we can multitask. You can’t read email and be in a video meeting at the same time. She refers to a day when she accidentally booked herself into two teleconference meetings, and sat in on both with an earpod in each ear, unable to fully engage. 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.”
Ironically, as she tells me this, the phone I’m recording our interview on sends me another notification as a new email lands. I choose not to read it, even though I’m temporarily distracted. Ping, my phone beeps again as a family group chat sends me an alert. The message can wait.
She writes that technology was supposed to give us relief, but in many situations, it has added to our woes. The internet is designed to hook us in, and even film and TV are produced to be addictive. Internet surfing is like “mind-wandering’'. “We can be in an attention trap for hours,’’ she writes, adding that if we keep our goals at the forefront, our attention can instead be directed to those.
She also argues we can’t be “on’' all the time, as this leads to exhaustion. We should do the rote tasks at times when we’re not focused, and if that means scrolling on our phone for a bit, that’s fine. The point is, she says, we should be better at following our rhythms in the day, so we have focused and non-focused times.
“Technology has given us the capability to extend ourselves. We end up getting ourselves exhausted. One of the ways we can take a break is to just do simple rote activities, such as gardening. It’s calming and can help people replenish.’’
There are other strategies she is in favour of: silent times, when organisations are not allowed to send emails, or batching, when emails are sent at certain times a day. “It’s not the silver bullet, but it can change people’s habits of checking their devices all the time.’’
Hardwired to check
Though the right to disconnect is still controversial (how about that employee who spends a good chunk of the workday on personal admin knowing they will catch up on work messages later at home?) Mark is in favour of regulations around the concept, which she hopes will become the new normal.
“We’ve just been expanding the bounds of what’s normal. What’s normal is to be on electronic communications with your colleagues 24/7. People talk about waking up in the middle of the night to check their phone for work emails, and that’s become normal. We need to stop that practice and to change.’’
James McCulloch agrees. Not long after starting as the chief executive of Victim Support nine months ago, he was worried about his own stress load – waking in the night to check an email, and taking work home, which interrupted his personal life.
With this in mind, he told the organisation’s 500 staff and volunteers that they should send emails only between work hours – if they want to send one after 6pm, it has to be “critical’'.
Ditto with Friday afternoons, when no one should send a work message after 1pm, “because you’re only passing on a mental load for someone to worry about over the weekend’'.
He wrote to staff, “Our brains are now hardwired to feel compelled to check [emails] straight away. Without getting too nerdy, this ‘context switching’ is a big problem in workplaces and a big reason why we get so tired, and feel that simple stuff can take us ages (because we keep switching back and forth).
“Of course, we all need to keep across email and Teams, etc, and are already checking those things anyway … so why not experiment with turning a few notifications off and take back control?”
Again, emails or messages should be sent only if they’re critical and can’t wait until Monday. “The exceptions are if it’s service related or critical operationally, so we know that if something lands it’s important.”
He speaks to the Listener not long after Cyclone Gabrielle, and Victim Support volunteers have been working around the clock. For organisations used to responding to crises, staff have to be ready to leap when needed.
At other times, McCulloch doesn’t contact staff out of hours, because he knows people will feel obligated to read the message or email and respond. “Our expectations have completely shifted about what is a reasonable response, too. We expect everyone to jump straight away. The world of work has been turned on its head in three years.
“The reality is we also don’t get things all the time when we’re constantly responding to messages. We need deep work to be done.”
Leadership needed
Do we need legislation around it? The UK native shakes his head. “I don’t know if we need to do that here, but I’ve been watching what is happening overseas. The more leaders speak about it and make changes, too, then it becomes a cultural expectation. The world of work has changed post-pandemic. I’d like to see more organisations talking about it and more leaders doing this.”
McCulloch laughs, recalling the moment he got his Blackberry in the early 2000s and could read emails on his phone. “That was the game-changer. It was so amazing. But now we’re traipsing our whole desk around in our pockets. That’s cool, because we can have a bit more balance – and why not work flexibly?
“But we don’t want the dark side to take over because we’re always on. We now need to create boundaries.”
Deep work
That’s one of the points that Dougal Sutherland, the CEO of workplace consultancy Umbrella Wellbeing, tells an array of organisations, including government departments, private companies and the Sir John Kirwan Foundation. Sutherland hears often that information overload is one of the big workplace stresses.
The clinical psychologist advises clients to create “deep work’' times when messaging is switched off, and tells bosses and managers to be aware that it can be stressful to contact employees outside of work hours.
“They may not think that it matters if they send an email at 9pm because the person doesn’t have to read it. But the employee might feel they have to respond.’’
Sutherland also points out that we expect instant responses, behaving in a 24/7 cycle, even though in pre-email times it could take five days to hear back from someone. This concept of being “always on’' has evolved without much thought of the psychological impact.
2 degrees trialled a “right to disconnect” policy back in 2018 and was understood to be the first New Zealand organisation to do so. But chief people officer Jessica Bartlett says the policy has since been modified because so many staff work flexibly, including working from home. Some start work early and others come in late. “The email policy drafted in 2018 hadn’t factored this in,” says Bartlett. “It was designed for a world where most staff worked nine to five, and that world has changed. It’s a great guide, but we are using the spirit of it, rather than using it as a set rule.”
Silencing the pings
Looking ahead, Gloria Mark hopes technology will evolve so we have more control over it. In the meantime, she suggests we consciously seize control by turning off notifications and minimising the pings and disruptions throughout the day.
She would like digital giants such as Google and Meta to hire psychologists to think of the human impact of the programs and apps they create. She has worked on technology design teams, usually as the lone psychologist on a product.
“Most technology is designed by engineers without any thought to how people will be using the tech, and certainly without any thought about how it will affect our wellbeing.
“Psychologists are hired to work out how to make the technology more attractive. I’m saying, ‘Let’s employ them to do the opposite.’”
In the future, we may have our own personal, AI-based digital assistant who will know our rhythms, tell us when to focus and when to switch off. And we may own our own data and our own algorithm.
Mark is not a Luddite, and she talks about technology offering the power of connection in ways we have never had before. Our Zoom interview beams us into one another’s offices even though we are about 11,000km apart, and it hasn’t cost us anything apart from a bit of data.
When we’re finished, I sift through the messages and emails that have landed in the past 45 minutes and unsubscribe from those that clutter my promotions folder. I switch my phone to focus mode and turn off all my notifications from social media.
After a few hours’ work (Mark has confirmed what I knew, that the afternoon is when I’m most focused), I go for a bush walk to clear my head. For the first time in months, I leave my phone behind and all the beeps and pings I usually hear are replaced by the soothing sound of birds chirping in the trees.
Attention Span: Finding focus for a fulfilling life, by Gloria Mark (HarperCollins, $37.99).