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5 Secrets About Your Mind That Will Boost Your Attention Span
Your ability to concentrate on the task at hand is critical to your creativity and performance.
Our focus and attention span have continued to shrink in recent years, becoming even shorter than ever before.
You’re at work, trying to focus on a task, but your phone keeps buzzing with notifications, your inbox is filling up with emails, and your colleagues keep interrupting you with urgent requests. Sound familiar?
We’re rarely without something interrupting us every few minutes, and over the years, this constant barrage of digital distractions means that our ability to concentrate has only gotten shorter. But just how short is it?
Well in 2005, Dr. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, decided to find out how often people switch between tasks and how long they stay focused on a single task before switching to another one.
In her study, she observed and recorded the behavior of knowledge workers in a corporate office setting, tracking their computer activity and measuring the duration and frequency of task switching. What did she find?
Her experiment showed that people averaged a mere two and a half minutes on a given…