Resources

Worth your time on this question

Everything worth your time on the question: What does the way I spend my attention say about the life I am living?

Four things on this subject: one TAIU exercise and three things to read. It opens with Attention Span by Gloria Mark. Read this before you buy another app to fix your concentration.

This page is for going further on your own. If you would rather work the question out with somebody asking, that is the conversation.

Where does my attention actually go?: talk it through

TRY · 10 MIN

Digital Reality Check

TAIU

Assumed screen behaviour and recorded screen behaviour are usually different.

Compares assumed screen behaviour with recorded screen behaviour.

Try it →

Was this useful?

READ · BOOK

Attention Span

Gloria Mark

Read this before you buy another app to fix your concentration. The evidence points at the environment you are working inside, not at your character.

Mark has measured what people actually do at a computer for twenty years, rather than what they report doing. The average uninterrupted stretch on one screen has fallen from around two and a half minutes to under fifty seconds, and roughly half of the interruptions are self generated. Her argument is that attention is shaped by design, rhythm and workload before it is shaped by willpower.

Flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Best for working out which of your attention actually returns something.

The original work behind absorbed attention: the conditions are a clear task, immediate feedback and difficulty roughly matched to skill. Useful here as a discriminator. Attention that absorbs you and attention that merely holds you feel similar in the moment and leave you in completely different states afterwards.

A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind

Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert

Sampling thousands of people at random moments, the study found that minds wander around forty seven per cent of the time, and that people were less happy when their attention was elsewhere than on what they were doing, almost regardless of what that was. Where the mind goes when nothing demands it turns out to be worth looking at.

Recommended by the TAIU community

What helped you?

If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.

We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.