The New York Times: “How to Focus Like It’s 1990”

In 2004, Gloria Mark, a [Chancellor’s] Professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, watched knowledge workers go about a typical day at the office. Using a stopwatch, she noted every time they switched tasks on their computer, moving from a spreadsheet to an email to a web page to a different web page and back to the spreadsheet. She found that people averaged just two and a half minutes on a given task before switching. When Dr. Mark repeated the experiment in 2012, the average time office workers spent on a task had dropped to 75 seconds. And it has continued to drop from there.

Read the full story at The New York Times (subscription required, UCI campuswide access if provided by UCI Libraries).