Gloria Borger: When I first met you, one of the things that concerned me wasn't just the present state of affairs in 2013. It was almost like hitting peak oil and saying, oh my God, what are we going to do? And then people started fracking for attention, realizing, hey, we could actually double the size of the attention economy by getting you to pay attention to two things at once. So I am hopeful that we will find solutions because we just can't continue at this rate," she says.
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.