Gloria Mark | Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity

Srini Rao : Gloria, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Gloria Mark: Thank you for having me.

Srini Rao : It is my pleasure to have you here. So I found out about you cuz you have a new book out called Attention Span, which obviously is something that I think every one of us who is listening to this is.

Concerned with, and your name had come up so many times that the the books I've read by former podcast guests, so I figured it was a no-brainer to reach out to you. But before we get into the book in your work, I wanted to start by asking you, what did your parents do for a living and how did that end up shaping what you ended up doing with your life and career?

Oh,

Gloria Mark: Vince, that's very interesting. My, my father was an auditor for the government. He actually worked for, as a civilian for the Air Force. And my mother was a secretary and later became a a court reporter, but she also worked for the government. Yeah, both of my parents worked for the.

Srini Rao : What impact did that end up having on you? And what was your narrative about making your way in the world, in your household? Because I remember from early on in the book that you actually initially pursued a career in the arts.

Gloria Mark: Yes. So it, it wasn't so much the fact that my parents worked for the government.

It was more the fact that my parents really had an appreciation for reading. And so they read a lot. They, in fact, they always disparaged our school system because they didn't force kids to read so much. But my parents were role models in the sense that they they not only read a lot, but, I felt that they had more of an intellectual bent than most of the people in the area where I grew up.

,

Srini Rao : I, every time I talk to educators, I am always curious about how they would actually redesign our modern education system. I know that you are in the uc system. My dad is a professor in the uc system, and he and I go back and forth constantly about the value of education. And as a Berkeley undergrad, I always joked that I was a failed byproduct of this system.

But if you had been tasked with redesigning the entire system from the ground up, based on your upbringing and what you said about, not instilling more reading in kids, what would you change about the way that we educate

Gloria Mark: people? Oh, wow. That's a big . It's a big topic. Do you want me to talk from the perspective of the student or the perspective of professors and teachers?

How about you? Give me both. Okay. All right. So the overriding theme that covers both of them is to restructure the system. Along with incentives so that people can have longer periods of time to focus. So from a student's perspective they're always switching between different classes. And of course we know that when people shift their attention very fast they make more errors.

They can't really get very deeply into a topic. It, it does create stress, but the system is designed for kids to be switching back and forth. Then of course, they have their own personal spears that they're also switching back and forth. Between my daughter went to Colorado College, which has a very different approach.

They do one class at a time. And you get very deeply immersed in one class for a period. I think it's about six weeks, and you do nothing else except that class. You live, breathe, . Think about that class. And as a result I think that's a much better educational experience for for students because they can really go very deeply every day.

That's all you're talking about. It's all you're thinking about. And it really gives you a chance to go into a lot of depth, from the perspective of professors, which, I can talk about. I've had a lot of experience in the uc system. I know that professors are always under the gun to excel, not just in research, but also in teaching and in service commitments and, We're also switching attention because we have all these different spheres of work that we have to take care of, that we have to excel in.

And so it's very hard to stay focused on one particular thing when we have so many competing demands. So I would restructure the the educational system at the university level for professors so that they're rewarded not on quantity of publications, but really on the contributions that they make.

And it may be that instead of writing and publishing 10 papers, you do one, but you do one that's really going to be impactful. And that's the paper that you get to be known for. So I would really restructure it in that way. .

Srini Rao : You mentioned this idea of going deep and I knew that I was gonna be talking to you and I wanted to bring back a clip from a conversation I had with David Epstein who wrote the book Range.

Take a Listen

Gloria Mark: going Forward to Higher Ed, which you mentioned. I think there are two main issues here. Main problems. First is what I write about in range called the End of History illusion. This psychological finding that at every time point in life we will all recognize that we have changed a lot in the past based on our experiences.

And then say, but now I'm pretty much done and every time point in life we will, we'll say that and we will be wrong. We will underestimate future change at every time point, even when we're very old. But at no time is that more true than from about 18 to the late twenties. That's when you undergo the fastest time of personality change.

And so essentially right at the start of that period, we're telling someone pick now, which, which is really asking them to pick for a person they don't yet know. . And certainly in a world they can't yet conceive unless they have a crystal ball that

Srini Rao : most people don't. So how do you balance what David is saying there with this idea of also going really deep into one area?

Gloria Mark: Yeah I don't think there's a contradiction at all because I think if a person really becomes proficient in one area, it's it's possible to take that expertise and be able to transfer it into something else. I started out in art, in fine art, so my first degree is in fine art and I was able to switch over to science, and I found that the experience of doing art and learning how to do what's called lateral thinking which is a way to a form of creativity I found that to be so useful in my career as a scientist.

because it enabled me to form hypotheses that maybe a lot of people might not have done, because typically science trains people in linear logical thinking. , and, this creates pretty narrow bounce of reasoning. And so I, I do think that a person can really become deeply proficient in one area, and then you can take that experience.

It's a different topic, but you can take that experience you have of learning and you can apply it in a different area. Yeah. To

Srini Rao : anybody who's a parent listening to this, who has a kid who was starting college or apparently in college, what would you say to them about helping their kids make the most of that college experience?

Gloria Mark: Oh I'm a big advocate that. Young people should study whatever they're passionate about. Really find what you're interested in and you will make it work in terms of becoming sustainable after you graduate, but really study what you're passionate about. And I've met so many people that have majored in fields that where you wouldn't think there would be a financial reward but they managed to make it work.

And it's so important to keep that passion alive when a student is in their undergrad and through graduate school if they choose to go there. Yeah.

Srini Rao : I would imagine that would make, paying attention a lot easier. Just, hearing you say that, I, looking back to my own experience at Berkeley, I realized it was never genuinely interested in any of the things that I was studying that were all a means to an end.

And so it was always hard for me to focus on, I realized the times that it was easiest to actually pay attention were the times when I was genuinely curious or interested in something.

Gloria Mark: Yes, absolutely. And that's, this is another problem with the educational system. Why is it that we've created courses that we're, it's so hard for students to, to become interested in them?

I think any field, physics, biology, chemistry, history, anthropology, any of those fields a person could be passionate about. I think we have to examine the way these courses are being taught. When it comes to relationships, a genuine connection is everything.

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Gloria Mark: It was it was a person by the name of Manfred Cochen. And let me also start by saying by, by the time I graduated from art, I realized how hard it was to make a living in art.

And I saw the most talented recent graduates. Who were working at jobs eight hours a day in things they didn't like in order to support their art. And a lot of people can do that. But that wasn't for me. And I also was good in other things like math and science and I thought, I can't be equally creative in those areas and I would have a lot easier of a time getting a job.

And so I switched. And so I was at University of Michigan starting graduate work and I needed a job and I saw an ad for a research assistant. And so this was, the ad was put out by Manfred Cochen, who was an information scientist. And I went and visited him and he asked me, can you code? I said, Nope. Do you know network theory?

Nope. Do you know. Queuing theory. Nope. He asked me all these things and I kept saying no. And so I just picked up my backpack, thanked him and started to walk out. And then he called after me and said, wait a minute. What can you do? And I said I can paint and and I can draw. And he said, come back and sit down.

And he said, before he got his PhD in math at m i t, he studied at the Art Student League in New York. And we talked about art for the next two hours. And then he asked me, do I think I can investigate the discovery process because he has a grant to study this? And I said, of course I can. I know how artists make discoveries.

I just didn't know how to put it into scholarly terms. And in order to do this research, I took a very deep dive. Into cognitive psychology. And I just started, on my own learning cognitive psychology and I was able to write about how artists make discoveries and that set me on a path to pursuing a PhD in psychology.

And I went to Columbia to do my PhD.

Srini Rao : You opened the book by saying that people say that it's just too hard to focus when they're on their computers and smart phones. We will see in this book that distractions are not just due to notifications popping up across their screens or the chimes of their phones.

Surprisingly, people are merely as often distracted by something within themselves, a thought of memory, an urge to look up information or desire to connect with others. When you're immersed in the world's largest candy store, it's hard to resist sampling the. How did we get into this mess in the first place?

And, is there a way out of it that isn't as extreme as our friend Cal Newport talks

Gloria Mark: about? There most certainly is a way out. How did we get ourselves into this position, ? As you mentioned it's the world's largest candy store and every year there's always some new source of distraction that that enters.

And not every year I would say, every week. So we're, certainly faced with all kinds of potential distractors. You can turn off notifications, of course. I think many, maybe most people do. So it's not only external notifications that cause our attention to to wander, but it's also.

Thoughts inside ourselves. And we're almost as likely to interrupt ourselves as to be interrupted by something external, even a phone call. And where do these inner urges come from? They come from habit. It c could come from remembering something we had to do. Also a big component of that was discovered by a researcher about a hundred years ago called Bluma Zeigarnik.

And Bluma Zeigarnik she worked in, at University of Berlin and she found that when people have interrupted tasks, they're more likely to remember them than tasks that are finished. Why? Cuz when you finish something it's off your plate, you're done with it. When you haven't finished something, there's still a tension.

That an individual has to finish that task. So there's this, think of it as this memory that remains on the back burner of your mind and it is just sizzling there. And this is another reason for self interruption because we have so many interrupted tasks. We have that email that we looked at the subject header and figured we would go back to it.

We've interrupted tasks, writing a book, chapter, creating a budget. Our days in our, current environment are comprised of shifting our attention rapidly. And with that very often comes interrupting tasks. Yeah.

Srini Rao : Let's talk about multitasking because you say there's a paradox in the very design of the internet itself, a structure that makes it easy to find information and maps onto how our memory is organized as a network of associations.

But the node and link structure of the internet also goes us into spending countless hours surfing the internet. We may have the illusion that we're doing more, and that our human capacity has expanded when we shifted our attention, our multitask, but we're actually doing less. And thinking about this internet rabbit hole thing, it reminded me of an old business partner who told me he got on Google one day, I think he was reading about an upcoming election, and by the time he was done, he had told me that he had basically spent an hour researching spirit cooking about elected officials.

I was like, how the hell did you get from researching, current politics to spirit cooking?

Gloria Mark: That, that sounds very familiar. I hear that a lot. I experienced that myself too. Let's when we talk about how the internet is designed to

,

distract us let's start with the original idea of the web and it goes back to, The engineer van our bush with his idea of the mes.

And I know a lot of people have heard about the MES idea. Have you heard of it? , do you know about it? Yeah. Yeah. But a lot of people haven't, so maybe I can explain it very quickly. So Van, our Bush was the head of the US Office of Scientific Research in 1945, and he had to deal with a lot of information and he was very dissatisfied with the current systems of organizing information, which was the Dewey Decimal System.

And that organized information based on a hierarchy. And he said this doesn't work because that's not how humans think in terms of associations. So he came up with this idea, the mes. Which it was a concept. It was never built. And the idea was that all of our personal information should be linked together through its associations.

So for example, if I had a dinner party and I took photos, I might link those photos to the recipes of the dishes that we served, and I might link it to to correspondence with other people who went to the dinner party. Fast forward, and the mes served as the basic inspiration for the design of the web.

And the web, of course, is organized in terms of information that's linked together through associations and this. Mimics the way that human memory is theorized to be organized in terms of a semantic network. So when I think of pizza, I think of raised pizza, right? Because I lived in New York. If you hear pizza, you might think of cheese or pepperoni because that's your experience.

So when we go to we're on the the web and we're, we read something, say we're on a Wikipedia page, we read an idea and that sparks all kinds of associations in our mind. We see a link that maps onto one of these associations. We click on it, we read new content. It sets off just a firestorm of associations in our minds.

And there's this kind of back and forth that, we come up with new ASA associations. We can pursue those on the web. We also see links. We can pursue those. And so there's this kind of back and forth, and before you know it we're joy riding through the web. Wow.

Srini Rao : Let's talk about multitasking because you say that it's been shown to be associated with lower performance when objectively measured.

You talk about the switch costs negative emotions, but you say the highest cost is in using our precious and limited attentional capacity or cognitive resources, especially when we have to keep track of multiple interrupted tasks. It's like having a tank that leaks and leaves less fuel for actually doing our work.

So how do you deal with this issue of multitasking? In a world where we are, constantly interrupted, or me, right now I have one browser tab open, which has my note taking app which happens to be organized exactly like the web, but it has my notes for your book, for example, and I have to keep other things shut off.

So how do we deal with this issue of multitasking?

Gloria Mark: So first of all you're right in the sense that there, there is a performance cost. So we know that multitasking causes higher errors. We know this in real world studies of physicians, nurses, pilots. We know this from decades of laboratory studies that show multitasking leads to more errors.

You write about a switch cost that every time you switch your attention to something else it, it takes time to orient to that new activity. . And so when we're switching very rapidly and we do switch very rapidly on our screens, on average 47 seconds, we're always having to reorient. And the metaphor that I like to use is that we have this internal whiteboard in our minds and every time we switch attention, think of it as erasing the information you needed for that last task and having to write new information for the current task you're doing.

And that's a switch cost that takes time for our mines to, to come up with this new information. Sometimes just like with a real whiteboard, we can't erase it completely and there's a residue. And so if I'm reading some gripping news story and then I try to go back to work that news story, parts of it might stay with me.

And interfere with my task at hand. So that's another kind of cost. And of course, you're right. It causes stress. We know in laboratory research it increases blood pressure. There's a physiological marker that's associated with stress that, that rises. In, in my work where we've used heart rate monitors and logged computer activity, we see a very strong correlation with stress and attention shifting.

And people report subjectively that they have higher perceived stress when attention shifts. , so there's a lot that's going on when people multitask.

Srini Rao : Yeah. So one thing you talk about is these four distraction myths. The first is that we should always strive to be focused on our computers, and in that way we can be productive.

Flow is the ideal state we should strive for when we use our technologies, distractions, interruptions, and multitasking. We experience while on our devices are due primarily to the notifications we receive and to our own lack of discipline and wrote mindless activity that we do on our computers has no value.

And it's funny because some of that flies in the face of a lot of the things that people like Steven Kotler and Cal Newport have written about. So talk to me about these four distraction myths.

Gloria Mark: Sure. So let's start with the idea of having long periods of unbroken focus. We have limited attentional resources and, you, you can't have long stretches of unbroken focus without taking a break in the same way that we can't lift weights all day without taking a break, right?

We use up our resources when we're focused. The idea of flow, right? It's flow is a wonderful idea. It's an idea that the psychologist Miha came up with. And it's the idea that we are so embarrassed in what we're doing that we just lose track of time. We're just not aware of time passing.

When I was in art, I would get into flow regularly. And so if a person is in a field like art or music or if you do sports if you have a hobby that you're passionate about woodworking or ceramics these are all ways that you can get into flow when you can get into flow pretty easily.

But for people who. Do knowledge work. It's a different kind of mindset. It's more of an analytical kind of thinking that's done. And the nature of the work is not very conducive to flow. A person who's working in a budget or working on a strategic plan, even writing if I write an article I will use analytical thinking.

I will be focused, but I won't be in a state of flow. And I've talked to many people in information work who say they might get into flow if they're in a brainstorming session with other people, right? That, that might work. People who do complex coding can get into flow.

People who play games on a computer, Can get into flow, but it's just not a state that it, that we might expect to happen very often in information work. But the kind of thinking we do use analytical thinking can result in doing things that are very rewarding and very fulfilling.

So we don't have to get into flow like I did as an artist or as musicians do. And Le I'll give you another example. There's a person I interviewed in the book who's musician Barry Lucero, and he talks about how he gets into float when he plays music. And he plays jazz and he plays rock, and the musicians play off of each other and they get into this flow state.

But in his other work, in his day-to-day job, he he books musicians and he's not in flow when he does this, he has to be focused. So it's different kinds of thinking. Should we, if, should we go on first? Yes, please. Some of the other let me talk about the road mindless activity.

This gets a very bad rap. And, the idea is we should stay away from doing anything mindless because it's distracting and it doesn't serve a purpose. And I disagree because having be, being deeply engaged in something but not using a lot of mental effort can be a good way to step back and replenish ourselves from.

When we're exhausted or when our cognitive resources are getting spent. And let me give the example of the writer Maya Angelo. And she had what she called her big mind, which she used for her creative deep thought. And she had her little mind, which she used to step back and replenish. And what did she do?

She played crossword puzzles so that was her road kind of activity. Simple crossword puzzles to, to replenish. So road activity can be done strategically as a way to step back. Now the best break of all. And I wanna go up on record saying that's the best break of all, is to go outside and take a walk in nature for 20 minutes because we know that's the most restorative way to, to get back our attention.

From my own research, we know that it increases divergent thinking, which is think of it as brainstorming, but circumstances don't always allow for us to do that. If you can't do that, should get up, walk around for a break that's also great. But it's also not bad to just do something, that's simple and easy, keeps you mentally engaged.

It, it allows ideas to incubate in the back of your mind. And people report all kinds of simple activities. You can do knitting. Someone talked about throwing a ball against a screen putting with a golf putter, putting a ball. There's all kinds of ways and whatever works for you in that sense.

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Srini Rao : So the thing that caught my attention about all the activities you mentioned is that none of them involved the internet or the computer.

Gloria Mark: There's nothing inherently wrong with doing some simple activity on your phone or the computer either. My road activity that I turn to is is this anagram game.

It's very easy. . And it's, it just, it gives my mind a, a kind of break, but it, but I'm lightly very lightly engaged. What's the problem is when we get stuck, when we go in, into a rabbit hole with these games. And so you have to be very strategic and you have to make sure to limit your time when you do it.

So if you've got a few minutes before you know you're gonna go into a tough meeting sure, that's fine to do one in these simple activities there's no problem. You've got this hook to pull you out, which is the meeting. But don't get yourself stuck. That's the important point.

These simple activities can be very alluring and magnetic and keep us stuck to them. And so you need to devise a way to not get yourself stuck. Which is setting a timer probing yourself. Keep asking yourself, do I feel replenished? Okay, time to step back. The

Srini Rao : other thing I noticed is that you didn't mention social media as one of these rote activities because, I have a feeling that, a lot of people are thinking to themselves, great, that means I can go and screw around on Facebook for a little bit.

And I'm curious what your research shows about that, because I feel like that when I do that as a rote activity, if I did any of the things you were mentioning, I would find them replenishing. But for some reason, if I go on social media it either turns into hours of distraction. Don't get me wrong, there are times when I've gone on social media where I've actually gotten something useful.

Like I've met a lot of podcast guests from browsing Twitter. Sometimes something somebody writes on Facebook sparks an idea for a blog post. But I'm curious, about the role of social when it comes to these rote activities.

Gloria Mark: Yeah. So it, it depends on the individual. I probably would not recommend doing social media as a way to take a quick break.

For some people it doesn't make them very happy for others they do. By the way the research is really mixed on it's and it's very nuanced on the effects that social media has on our our moods. I would be very careful with social media, and you're right, it's it's easy to go down a rabbit hole in social media.

Srini Rao : ,

let's talk about this idea of cognitive resource allocation, because you say that your cognitive resources can drain and that affects your performance in the short term, say when you're working on an hour long effi task in dealing with interruptions. But in the long run, over the day, homeostatic variation of the time of lapse absence you woke up is also stated with declining performance.

The reason you feel drain and start making errors is likely that you've been using these limited resources like there's no tomorrow, and the demands on them exceed what you have available. And you say the theory of limited cognitive resources can explain your performance when your workload is high.

When I read that section of your book, it, it sparked an idea for a blog post, basically talking about how do you plan your day based on cognitive resource allocation. So talk to me about that. Like how would I, for example, somebody who host to podcast as interviews, writes, reads, et cetera based on cognitive resource allocation, like how would I allocate my cognitive resources most

Gloria Mark: effectively?

Yeah that's such a great question. So we found that people have rhythms over the course of the day for when they're at their peak focus and when they're in, you can think of it as trust. And so the, one of the first things that you can do is understand when your peak focus times are. And it has to do with with a lot of things.

It concerns your chronotype. Are you in the early type? If so, your peak will be earlier in the day. Are you late time? It's gonna be later. We find that for most people, their peak focus times are mid to late morning, and then again mid to late afternoon, like two to 3:00 PM So plan your day so that the hardest task you have to do and the task that requires the most creativity is done at those peak focus times.

Most people actually don't start their day doing their hardest tasks. But they ramp themselves up. They get themselves ready. Think of it as getting those wheels, turning to, to do those really hard tasks when they're a little bit later. So for example, for myself I start my day usually doing email, which is to get it out of the way.

For the most part it's not a hard task. And if I don't do email first, the Zy garnate effect is going to kick in and I'm gonna be thinking about that unfinished task and it's gonna be bothering me. So I do the email to get it out of the way, and then I start working on a hard task.

Design your day intentionally to think about those times of the day when your focus is at its peak and. Make sure to intentionally design significant breaks into your day. And, these are times of the day when you're just really pulling back and that's when you can schedule in your 20 minute walk.

And if that doesn't work, you can do

,

contemplation or meditation or, whatever works for you to be able to replenish. It's so important to be able to replenish, and you can think of it as when we do less, we can actually accomplish more, because by, by pulling back and replenishing it gives us more sustenance so that we can go back and work more effectively.

Srini Rao : Let's talk about this idea of shifting between working spheres. So for example, right now I'm talking to you, I'm, doing an interview for my podcast, but when I'm done, the thing I know that I wanna work on is something that I'm writing, and I'm curious about the transition between working spheres and how you do that without draining your cognitive resources.

Yep.

Gloria Mark: When you need to take a break, it's best to do it at what's called a break point in the task. So do it at a point in the task where you have completed a thought, so you know, never under it, never interrupt yourself. In the middle of a paragraph, finish, finish a section of what you're writing.

Or if you're working on a budget fi, finish a complete portion of that budget before you start and switch to something else. We wanna minimize this notion of this I Garic effect, where you've got this unfinished task and you have to go back to it. Of course if you still are writing that say that book chapter, you're still working in that budget.

It's still gonna be in your, at the, in the back of your mind. But it'll, it will have less tension for you because you've already completed a, you've come to a resting point in that task. The best thing of all is to monotask to be able to work through one task to completion before working on something else.

Going back to what we talked about earlier in the show about reforming the university system for professors that I think it's so useful if professors. Just had a single project to work on, but they really worked on it in depth and then they wouldn't be switching between, having six or 10 different research projects each with different priorities and each with different deadlines.

That's what hurts our performance and creates trust.

Srini Rao : Okay. Let me frame this with a concrete example. So I conduct my interview with you. I know it's gonna be published, probably about three weeks from now or so. We have to basically put it into our database where it gets marked as recorded.

I have to add a headshot so our illustrator can do an album cover and then I'll go back to doing, whatever it was I was working on prior to the interview. So I guess the question then is, a lot of times I end up just marking the interview as recorded and then going back to whatever I was doing, and I end up having to go back and do that stuff later.

So I'm just curious, if we were talking about this in particular, like how would you approach this based on your research? Say I've finished my interview with you, I know the next thing I wanna do is work on my writing project. What does that look like from, in the transition between those two working spheres?

Ideally?

Gloria Mark: Okay. So you're, would you say that the interview then is completed except for the fact

Srini Rao : that once, yeah, once you and I have recorded and, I press stop record and we both hang up to me, the interview is completed at that point. Granted, there's ancillary tests that need to be done in order for the interview to be published.

. But the interview is completed.

Gloria Mark: I was most certainly take a break, get your mind refreshed so that you're not just moving directly from one working sphere to another. The problem that really became exacerbated during the pandemic was that people would schedule Zoom meetings back to back.

And then they would go from one meeting to another without any transition in between. And so it's important to have a transition between working spheres. So it gives your mind a chance to refresh a bit and clear out the clutter from the last thing we did so that you're ready to tackle something new.

The typical practice of scheduling our day is to schedule things back to back, at 11 o'clock, here's what I'm doing at 12 o'clock, here's what I'm doing. And instead of scheduling things back to back like that, instead schedule things based on how much attention you have available, considering the fact that you need some time to replenish, build your resources back up.

And if you just did a, an interview that's probably spending a good deal of your attentional capacity. And so step back for a bit. Replenish. And then you can go on and do your writing. Yeah.

Srini Rao : That's actually why I only do one interview for a day, because I noticed if I tried to do more than one, the quality would decline.

Yeah. I

Gloria Mark: and I would think so because you're expending so much mental energy in doing this and it's, there, there would be a residue I would think, because you've, you've been very immersed in this interview and suddenly you're switching to do writing and sometimes it's hard to get some of the content out of your mind of of the last working sphere that you did. Yeah.

Srini Rao : Talk to me about the four properties of human agency from Bandura and this concept of meta-awareness to actually have some control over our behavior when it comes to our digital habits.

Gloria Mark: Yeah I draw on the work of Albert Bandura, who was a very prominent social psychologist who worked on the idea of self-efficacy.

And I do believe that people can gain agency and control over their attention in the digital world. And so the first property is called intention. And a lot of things we do when we're on our devices are automatic. So I might grab my phone, that's an automatic behavior. I might switch to news or to social media.

That's automatic. Sometimes these internal interruptions, these self interruptions we do are based on automatic behaviors. Responding to notification is automatic. The idea is to make these automatic actions conscious, to bring them into our conscious awareness. And when we can do that, then we can be intentional and act on it.

And so meta-awareness is this idea of being aware of what you're doing as it's unfolding. The idea came to me during the pandemic. My university offered a course in mindfulness-based stress reduction, and I found it very valuable. It helps you focus on the present. And I realized that we could do something very similar when we're on our devices and we can probe ourselves by asking ourselves questions.

When you have that urge, To leave what you're doing and say, go check the news. You can learn to ask yourself, do I need to check the news right now? Why? Why am I doing it? Oh, it's because this is boring. This task is boring. But I find that the act of probing myself helps keep me on track, and it prevents me from going to that other site.

And if I am on a site say social media, I can probe myself and I can say, okay have you really gotten what you need from this art? Or if I'm on a news site, am might ask myself, am I just getting marginal returns? I've gotten the gist of the story. I've read a couple of paragraphs.

I do, I really need to report. So metaawareness is a skill, it's a skill that anyone can develop and it's way to help keep us on track. The, another property is this idea of practicing forethought. And that means understanding how your current actions will impact your life later on in the day.

And I think end of the day is a really good time point to think about. So if I wanna spend 30 minutes reading the news, really visualize yourself at 10 o'clock at night and, am I really going to be able to relax and read my book or watch my favorite show drinking in glass of wine, or am I still gonna be working furiously on finishing this deadline?

So this can help stop us and keep us on course when we visualize our future selves later in the day. We can also Practice self-regulation. So another property. Some people were born with a very good ability to self-regulate. Others not but, even if you weren't born with good self-regulation skills, don't despair.

You can develop that. And first of all, we talked about turning off notifications, that's the first thing that that you should do. You can also be very strategic in how you use social media. Many people just accumulate so many different network connections and, a network of 2000 people is going to take up more of your time and attention than a much smaller network.

And there is something called the Dunbar number. Which the sociologist Robin Dunbar discovered, which is that people can only manage about 150 relationships in any kind of meaningful way. And it's funny because when I talked with my students about it one of my students went and cleaned up her social media account and limited to it to just 150 people.

I'm not recommending to do that. But if you do wanna do some house cleaning, that's just fine. But, be strategic. And very quickly the last property is about course correction. And, the idea of designing your day intentionally and understanding the times when your attention is at its peak and intentionally designing breaks into your day, Quiet time.

When you can go outside or meditate, contemplate or even doing road activity is also really important.

Srini Rao : One other thing that caught my attention in that section on agency was the idea of distraction blockers and the idea that we're effectively outsourcing our agency but not developing our capacity for it when we use them.

And I can tell you as somebody who uses them pretty regularly, they have been incredibly helpful. But I just wondered about that.

Gloria Mark: They can be very helpful. But remember the software becomes a proxy agent for you. And I would like to see people learn how to develop their own agency.

It's like having training wheels on your bike. You never learn how to ride the bike. We're in this digital world, right? The ship has sailed. And I think it's very important for us to be able to have control over our behaviors and be able to determine our ourselves how we wanna allocate our attention.

Having said this, I do think that there are opportunities for AI to be able to serve as coaches to help us gain control. Now, this is different from blocking sites. A coach can help a person understand, what their attentional capacity is, can help coach them into understanding how long they've been on a break.

Okay, now it's time to come back so that a person can actually get to know their own personal rhythm. And we did do a study at Microsoft Research. This was with a a person named Eve Kama Kimani. And we found there to be some promise with a conversational agent that could help peop could help coach people into improving their digital behaviors.

Let's

Srini Rao : wrap this up with two final things. You talk about this idea of taking a sociotechnical approach to our digital behavior, and you say that the internet is a marketplace of social capital. Social capital is the benefit we get from being in a group. We exchange resources through relationships.

These can be social, intangible or tangible resources. And our desire to gain social capital keeps our attention to drawn to social media. So talk to me about this because that, somebody like Cal Newport obviously takes, an extreme view on this and says, don't use it at all.

So where do you disagree with him on some of this?

Gloria Mark: Yeah. The technology we don't use technology in a vacuum, right? We bring our social natures, our cultural practices, our environment all of these influence the digital world that we're in. And social capital is just a very basic aspect of human nature.

And it's the idea that we trade favors with people. If I do something for you, I expect you're going to do something for me. If you invite me to some social event, I'm going to reciprocate and invite you. And it translates into how we use electronic communications. So I'm going to answer the email of someone with who I expect is going to do a favor for me.

At some point, I, I wanna maintain a balance of social capital with that individual. If that individual happens to be your manager, of course you're gonna, you're going to jump on that and make sure to monitor your inbox for messages from your supervisor or from a colleague because you wanna maintain good social capital.

And so that's that's how it works. And this is it helps serves to drive us to stay active on email, on social media. It's because of our social natures.

Srini Rao : This has been absolutely fascinating. I, so I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the unmistakable critic.

What do you think it's, that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Gloria Mark: So the. Sorry, can you re The question is yeah,

Srini Rao : what do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Gloria Mark: Oh, wow. What a great question. I'm not sure there's a single thing. I think it's a person who's very committed in, in what they believe it.

And I think that makes them you know that when you're committed in something, you have passion, you have drive, you have confidence, and I think others appreciate that. And they, they may not necessarily agree with that person, but they certainly recognize the draw if behind that individual.

And it, when a person has so much drive they also have grit and resilience. And that's what makes someone really successful for what they choose to do. It's not the fact that you have failed, but it's the fact that you failed and you've pulled yourself back up and you continued to go.

I had an art teacher, Mo Brooker, and probably the, my favorite saying of anything that anyone ever told was do you have the courage to fail? And taking risks and failing is really important. But when you have grit and resilience and draw, you can pull yourself back up and continue.

Amazing.

Srini Rao : I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story your wisdom and insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, your work the book and everything else that you're up to?

Gloria Mark: Sure. So you can go to my website, which is www.gloriamark.com.

That's all one word, Gloria Mark. And you can sign up for my newsletter and you can find information about the book There. You can also word the book at your favorite retailer.

Srini Rao : Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.

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