Attention Span: Intro + Chapter 1

"Reframing our goal from productivity to well-being”

Hello readers,

Welcome to your first reading recap of 2025! I’m reading Attention Span for the first time right along with you, and in these first ~40 pages I’ve already been impressed with Gloria Mark’s balance, thoughtfulness, and avoidance of playing the blame game.

This week, I’ll walk through a few things that stood out to me as well as some ideas to think about.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this first bit of reading!

White-breasted nuthatch at a local birdfeeder. This image has nothing to do with attention span, other than that I like it and I enjoyed giving my attention to it on New Year’s Day.

Unbreakable Bonds

“We have developed unbreakable bonds with our computers and phones for much of our waking hours.”

Dr. Mark starts with a central premise that we’re all familiar with and have felt in the last handful of years: Our phones and computers — and more specifically our inboxes and social media feeds — are taking more and more of our attention. Not only that, those devices seem to be making the quality of our attention much worse. We’re finding it harder to focus, harder to observe the world around us, harder to sit with boredom for more than about 10 seconds:

“Simply put, our use of personal technologies affects our ability to pay attention.”

But, she wisely notes that the reasons are more complex than it might seem at first blush. Like any technology, this stuff is not necessarily good or bad on its face; humans just haven’t quite healthily adjusted to this new technological era yet. Our distractability is not just due to notifications:

“People are nearly as often distracted by something within themselves—a thought, a memory, an urge to look up information or a desire to connect with others.”

One of the most interesting parts of this intro was Dr. Mark’s discussion of how our brains operate in a network fashion. It goes hunting for bits of information and makes connections, just like hyperlinks on the internet do. In an unexpected way, the architecture of the web has somewhat mirrored our brains, making those screens all the more attractive and harder to pull away from.