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New Philosopher

A mind full of distraction

n her new book, Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way To Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity, Dr Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, recounts a 2004 study in which she observed knowledge workers during a typical office day. She timed changes in tasks using a stopwatch and discovered that workers spent only two-and-a-half minutes on any given undertaking. Fast-forward to 2012 and another study utilising the same research protocols yielded a stunning result – the time spent on each task had halved to 75 seconds. Some ten years on, Mark wrote, “Our attention spans while on our computers and smartphones have become

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