We carried around stopwatches and we timed every single activity that people did to the second.

That's Gloria Mark. Back in 2004, she convinced a random sample of office workers to essentially ignore the clicking of her stopwatch, as she timed their every move.

They turned to their email, that would be start time, click on the stopwatch.

Then they turn away from email, that would be stop time. time,

click on the stopwatch, then they turn away from email, that would be stop time, click on the stopwatch.

And we recorded all these things so we could be as precise as possible.

Precision mattered because Gloria wanted to know exactly what people meant by the word

multitasking.

Remember, you know, this was the early 2000s at the height of the multitasking craze, but it was a totally vague concept. I mean, just how many tasks did the average

worker juggle? What is a task? It was anybody's guess until Gloria and her colleagues answered the question

with scientific precision.

And we found that people switched actions about every three minutes.

So that's not just what they're doing on the computer,

but what they're doing on the phone and interacting with people.

And at the time, this was 2004, people were shocked that it was three minutes.

They thought that was a very short amount of time.

Three minutes of uninterrupted attention by today's standards is remarkably long. I mean, it's

luxurious. The most recent statistic we have is back from 2016 where

people's attention on their computer for any screen, the median length was about 40 seconds.

40 seconds before your attention breaks.

It takes an act of extreme self-awareness to even notice all these hairline fractures.

When our attention breaks so chronically and so pervasively, we're not even noticing the full

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