People average about 74 times a day checking their email, but each time they check their email, they spend about 32 seconds on average. Half of all interruptions are due to oneself and we call these self-interruptions. We tend to think of interruptions as only coming from external identifiable sources like email notifications or social media notifications.
Every 40 seconds, our attention breaks. It takes an act of extreme self-awareness to even notice. That’s why Gloria Mark, a professor in the Department of Informatics at University of California, Irvine, started measuring the attention spans of office workers with scientific precision. What she has discovered is not simply an explosion of disruptive communications, but a pandemic of stress that has followed workers from their offices to their homes. She shares the latest findings from the “science of interruptions,” and how we can stop forfeiting our attention to the next notification, and the next one, ad nauseam.