It’s no wonder why it’s become so hard to focus, particularly if you’re not overly excited and energized by your day-to-day responsibilities.
Whether it’s to check email, read a few (supposedly) work-related websites, chat with family and friends, watch Netflix, or search for a date – the temptation to “do something else for a few minutes” is always just a few inches away from our keyboard and monitor.
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We don’t have to wait to get home to watch TV news shows or read the newspaper everything’s instantly available on our phone, which is right beside us while we work. The mechanics by which we now consume information illustrate the final reason why it’s hard to focus: the ready availability of distractions.
That, in turn, conditions us to expect important information to be short, to the point, and easy to understand. Their findings illuminate the second reason why it’s so difficult for us to focus: the researchers called it “increasing information flows.” In simpler terms, there’s more and more content than ever for people to consume, and the Internet – particularly social media – make it easy for us to consume it in bite-sized pieces. A comprehensive study published in the journal Nature Communications looked much more deeply into the issue the researchers didn’t quantify the average human attention span, but used a number of different measuring techniques to conclude that we unquestionably have “shorter attention cycles” than in the past. (Some say that even a goldfish has a longer attention span, at nine seconds).īut whether or not those Microsoft numbers are valid, the decline in attention span is very real. A huge debate followed the release of a 2015 Microsoft study which claimed that the average human attention span had declined from 12 seconds in 2000, to eight seconds in 2015. There are several reasons why it’s harder than ever for most people to focus at work.įirst, our attention spans are shorter than ever.
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