How to increase your attention span

Researchers who study attention at work rarely ask how long a person can focus. A question they can answer is how long people stay on one thing before they switch to another. Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how people work with computers, has counted this for two decades.

In the first of these studies, González and Mark (2004) shadowed 14 people at an investment firm, noting what each one did through the day, for 477 hours in all. The workers spent an average of 2 minutes and 11 seconds with any one device or paper document before moving to another. On any single activity, they averaged about 3 minutes.

Switching between a document and an email about the same project is not much of a break. So the researchers also grouped the work into projects, which they called working spheres. Even then, people stayed with a project for only about 12 minutes before turning to a different one.

Later studies logged computer screens instead of shadowing people. Mark described them in an interview published by her university. The average time on any one screen was 75 seconds in 2012 and 47 seconds in her more recent studies. The midpoint, the value that half of the stretches fell under, was 40 seconds. We read her account of those figures, not the papers behind them.

None of these numbers is an attention span. Each is a habit of switching, measured at a desk full of things to switch to. A habit is better news than a fixed limit, because habits change with practice.

Interruptions were the next thing Mark’s group counted. Mark, Gonzalez and Harris (2005) observed 24 office workers and found that 57.1% of their stretches of project work were interrupted. A stretch lasted 11 minutes and 4 seconds on average.

Most interrupted work was picked up again the same day: 77.2% of it. When people did go back, it was after 25 minutes and 26 seconds on average, and they had worked on about 2.26 other things in between.

Popular articles turn that finding into “it takes over twenty minutes to refocus after a distraction.” The paper says something else. The figure is how long it took people to return to the task, with other work filling the gap, and the spread around the average was very wide.

A lab experiment looked at what interruptions do to the work itself (Mark, Gudith and Klocke, 2008). 48 people each answered sets of 12 emails, either in peace or with a question from a “supervisor” about every 2 minutes. The result surprised the authors: the interrupted groups finished sooner, in about 20.31 and 20.60 minutes against 22.77 without interruptions, and the quality was no different.

The price showed up elsewhere. People wrote shorter emails and worked faster to make up the time, and they rated their stress at 9.46 on a 20-point scale, against 6.92 when left alone. Frustration, time pressure and effort rose as well. All of that came after only 20 minutes of interrupted work.

The phone is the interruption most people carry with them, and three studies describe what it does. The first is about the phone doing nothing at all. Ward and colleagues (2017) recruited 548 students, of whom 520 smartphone users made the final sample, and gave them tests of reasoning and of working memory, which is the ability to hold information in mind while you use it.

Every phone was on silent, with no ring and no vibration. One group left the phone face down on the desk, one kept it in a pocket or bag, and one left it in another room. The other-room group did better on the tests than the desk group. The pocket-or-bag group fell in between, not clearly apart from either.

Asked afterward, 75.9% of the students said the phone’s location had not affected their performance at all. The cost was real, and they could not feel it.

The same paper has a result that popular summaries leave out. A second experiment, with 275 students, added a plain test of staying on one simple task, and the phone’s location made no difference to that one. What the nearby phone drew on was the spare capacity people use to think, not their ability to keep going at something easy.

The second study is about a phone that buzzes. Stothart and colleagues (2015) found that notifications alone disrupted performance on a demanding attention task, even when people did not pick the phone up. The authors describe the effect as comparable in size to actually making a call or sending a text. We read the abstract of this paper, which gives no figures, so none are quoted here.

The third is about the habit of using several kinds of media at once. Ophir, Nass and Wagner (2009) gave a questionnaire to 262 students at Stanford, covering 12 kinds of media, and compared the heaviest media multitaskers with the lightest. The heavy group was worse at ignoring things that did not matter. They were also slower to move from one task to another: the extra time a switch cost them was 167 milliseconds greater than for the light group.

That study compared two groups at one moment. The authors say plainly that it cannot show which way the cause runs: heavy multitasking may wear down filtering, or people who filter poorly may multitask more. Either way, the practical step is the same, and it is the one the first study tested. Put the phone in another room.

Attention, as these studies describe it, is less a fixed span than a habit of staying or switching. Nobody in them was born switching screens every minute. A habit like that was practiced into place, and the opposite habit can be practiced too.

The unit of practice is the unbroken stretch. By that we mean the time from when you start one task to the first moment you leave it: to check a message, open another tab, or pick up the phone. A break you planned counts as the end of the stretch, and so does one you did not.

Two numbers are worth counting each day. The first is your longest unbroken stretch, in minutes. The second is your hours on the phone, because the studies above point to it as the main thing a stretch competes with. Everything else on this page is a way to move those two numbers.

The method is the one a runner uses. Find out what you can do today, do slightly more this week, and hold it before adding again. No study we read sets the right pace or a length that everyone should reach, so the ladder below lets you choose both.

1. Put the phone in another room. Silent and face down on the desk was the weakest setup in the experiment by Ward and colleagues. Out of the room was the strongest, and it costs nothing.
2. Turn notifications off for the stretch. A buzz you ignore still pulls at you. In the notification study, the alert alone was enough to hurt performance on a demanding task.
3. Choose one task and a start time. “Work on the report at ten” can be kept or broken. “Focus more today” cannot. Close the tabs and windows that belong to other projects before you begin.
4. Write down the stray thought and go on. In the study of office workers described above, analysts and developers broke off their own work about as often as someone else interrupted it. Keep a sheet of paper beside you, note the errand or idea, and return to it after the stretch.
5. Stop at the rung, then rest. When you reach this week’s length, take a real break away from the screen. The aim is a stretch you can repeat tomorrow, not one heroic afternoon. For longer blocks of demanding work, see the page on deep work.

Practice changes what the brain finds easy, which is the subject of the page on how to rewire your brain. Here the point is smaller: each of these five steps removes one reason for a stretch to end early.

Feeling more focused is a poor test, because the feeling moves with mood and sleep. Minutes and hours can be checked.

A good way to run this test counts both from what you already write or say about your day: when you sat down, when you stopped, when the phone came out. No timer to start and stop. Most journaling apps stop at how the day felt. They keep the feeling of being scattered, which matters, but not the minutes behind it.

One app built for this is Think in Numbers, a smart journaling app with time tracking built in.

You write or say your day in your own words, as it happens or all at once. The app reads what you wrote and counts the hours that went to each part of it: your reading or deep work, your longest unbroken stretch of it, your phone, and the time you never mentioned (shown as unaccounted). Then it shows those hours over days and weeks. A weekly view sets this week’s hours beside last week’s.

Write my first day

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For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.

The phone experiment shows why a count is worth the trouble. The students in it were sure the phone had made no difference to them, and the test scores said otherwise. A count does not depend on how the day felt.

Here is how the four weeks went for the example person from the table above, in reading time and in phone time. Every day was described in their own words and counted from those words.

In week one the longest unbroken stretch of reading was 10m, and the phone took 19h 30m of the week. By week two the longest stretch was 25m, and by week three 40m, with one evening missed after a launch went wrong.

Week four reached 45m in one sitting, reading on all 7 days, and the phone was down to 6h 45m. Both halves of the test passed: the stretch grew, and the phone hours fell.

The longest evening of that week, as the person wrote it and as it was counted:

Every figure on this page links to one of these sources. Seven were read in full, including the interview transcript. For the notification study we read the abstract, and we quote no figure from it.

1. BBC News (BBC World Service, More or Less) (read October 4, 2026). Busting the attention span myth.
2. González, V. M. and Mark, G. (2004). “Constant, constant, multi-tasking craziness”: managing multiple working spheres. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2004), 113-120.
3. University of California (read October 4, 2026). Can’t pay attention? You’re not alone.
4. Mark, G., Gonzalez, V. M. and Harris, J. (2005). No task left behind? Examining the nature of fragmented work. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2005), 321-330.
5. Mark, G., Gudith, D. and Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), 107-110.
6. Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A. and Bos, M. W. (2017). Brain drain: the mere presence of one’s own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2(2), 140-154.
7. Stothart, C., Mitchum, A. and Yehnert, C. (2015). The attentional cost of receiving a cell phone notification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 41(4), 893-897.
8. Ophir, E., Nass, C. and Wagner, A. D. (2009). Cognitive control in media multitaskers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(37), 15583-15587.

This page reports what research found about attention in everyday work and study. It is not medical advice.