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- [00:01]
A
This podcast is supported in part by Bill, the intelligent finance platform that helps businesses and accounting firms scale with proven results. On this show, we spend a lot of time questioning assumptions, especially the ones we've accepted as just the way things are. One assumption many organizations rarely rethink how their financial operations actually get done. That's why smart leaders turn to Bill with AI powered automation. Bill isn't just moving money, it's reducing the manual work of invoices and expenses for nearly half a million businesses. In fact, Bill reports that 98 of the top 100 US accounting firms trust them to manage, move and maximize their clients money all in one place. The right systems can free up time, reduce drag and make growth more intentional, eliminate the friction and start scaling with a platform built to evolve with you. Visit bill.com proven to talk with an expert about automating your business finances and and get a $150 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.com proven terms and conditions apply. See Offer page for details. This episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. I get to spend my days studying how people think and what it actually takes to change our minds. It's work I find deeply meaningful. But even in meaningful work, there's still busy work. The admin, the repetitive processes, the invisible load that pulls attention away from what really matters. That's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work, they actually do it. Start to finish, cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com People have
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B
always talked about interruptions as coming from some external source. From outside of us. We hear the ping on our phone or we get a notification, but but it turns out that people are about as likely to self interrupt, to be interrupted by themselves of their own volition.
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A
Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking My Podcast with Ted on the Science of what Makes us Tick. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people who explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. Gloria Mark is a Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine. She studies the impact of digital media on our lives, and she's the author of the book Attention Span, which explores our struggles with focusing for longer periods of time. She's conducted fascinating studies on multitasking, interruptions and the impact of email on our moods. Spoiler alert. It's not great news, but there's hope too, because she also discusses how attention spans are flexible and we can actually train ourselves to improve our concentration in our daily lives. I hope we hold your attention for this conversation. Think we will. I have to ask you just to kick us off as an attention expert, do you do audits of your own attention?
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B
Yes, I do. I mean, I practice this. It's more of an exercise. It's actually built into my routine when I have this urge to read the news or check my phone or do something. So it's. I've learned to recognize those urges.
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A
But for you, getting distracted is almost easier to justify because you can call it research.
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B
Yes, I can. I suppose I can. And then I could pursue it and see what exactly is it that I'm being distracted by, what caused my distraction, what do I do about it? So, yeah, I do tend to have this analytical perspective on my own distractions.
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A
When did you start to get worried that our attention was getting frayed or fragmented?
- [04:00]
B
Well, this actually started a long time ago. You know, I came to the US from Germany around the year 2000. I was working at a research institute. It was a very different culture. And then all of a sudden, I'm thrust into the world of American academia. And people were just frantic, you know, being an assistant professor and having to deal with all these different projects. So I first noticed my own attention being really fragmented. And then I started talking to other people around this time, and everybody else was saying the same thing. So it actually started over 20 years ago.
- [04:44]
A
And you did some of the pioneering work on actually measuring changes in our attention. How did you operationalize it?
- [04:51]
B
Right, so because people who we studied were digital information workers, I thought it made the most sense as a proxy for where people were paying attention to look at when they changed the contents of their screen. So that was measurable. It's not a perfect measure, but it's pretty darn close.
- [05:14]
A
And even your early findings were not encouraging?
- [05:17]
B
No, they were actually much worse than I expected. Back in 2003, when we started measuring this, I thought people might spend five minutes at a time, but it turns out they spent about two and a half minutes on any content on screen before switching. And if we looked more broadly at any activity that people did, we found it to be about three minutes on average. So that included interacting with people dealing with paper. Cause back in 2003, before people still used paper. And so, yeah, it was much worse than I had imagined.
- [06:00]
A
And what were your early hunches about why?
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B
My early hunches were that the scope of work had expanded, that people were just being faced with too much work to do. And on the one hand, it was projects, but on the other hand, it was just the information that people had to deal with. And at the time, email was really starting to take off, so the means through which information could be exchanged were just increasing. So it was a number of different things. Yeah, Ping. And that, too.
- [06:38]
A
So I think both information overload and just the number of channels that we can be interrupted on have only increased in the last two decades.
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B
Yes.
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A
What's happened to our attention as you've replicated this experiment over time?
- [06:53]
B
Yeah, our attention spans have diminished, so they've gotten shorter and shorter. So in 2012, we found the average length of time that people stayed with content on a screen was about 75 seconds. And then as we moved later and later, we found numbers like 47 seconds, 50 seconds, 44 seconds, and that averaged to about 47 seconds.
- [07:23]
A
Wow. I hope our listeners have now been listening for longer than that to this conversation. But what's going on there? Why. Why does it seem to be getting worse?
- [07:34]
B
Well, when you look back at all the changes that we've seen over, you know, since 2004, there are a lot of changes that happened in our digital environment. So let's start with email. Email just started taking off. And then we had additional ways to message. We had slack. In my view, slack is a lot worse when it comes to causing our attention to be fragmented. And then the big one in 2007 was that the smartphone was launched, and so that became a big distractor for people. And people began not only switching content on the same screen, but switching between different forms of media. So it was like another dimension to switching attention. And, yes, E commerce also took off. Right. Online shopping. And so many services now are on the web. News. Right. News began to be updated continually. And so all these changes were going on.
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A
You haven't even mentioned social media.
- [08:47]
B
Well, there's that. So, yeah, Facebook came along in 2004. And then, of course, there was Twitter and Instagram and TikTok. And all of these, of course, were just huge distractors for people. And of course, not just on their computers, but also on their phones as well.
- [09:10]
A
And, you know, one of the things that's striking to me is that at some level, this goes deep. It's not just that our attention might be hijacked. It's also, I think, visible in our bodies, according to your work. Tell me about the research you did on email and how it affects us physiologically.
- [09:32]
B
Yeah, we've Done a number of studies on email. And one study we did, we actually looked at thermal imaging in the face. And we found that when people turned to email based on the thermal imaging results, that their sweat increased, which is a measure of stress. So people became stressed. But we've also looked at email use when people were wearing heart rate mark monitors. And heart rate monitors give a measure of what's called heart rate variability. It's the distance between heartbeats and the variability of that distance. And we found based on that that people were stressed. And that of course was in real world environments. And we also did a study where this is not necessarily tied to just email, but it was a measure of interruptions in general. People were doing a task and were being interrupted with email. And we videotaped their faces. We used emotion recognition software on their faces, which is highly accurate in deciphering emotions. And we found when people were interrupted, they expressed significantly more anger and sadness on their face compared to when they weren't interrupted.
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A
So it's a little puzzling to me that on the one hand we don't like being interrupted, on the other hand, we're constantly interrupting ourselves.
- [11:08]
B
Yeah, so that was probably one of the most surprising things that I found in the research. We looked at our data of external interruptions and internal interruptions over the course of the day, and these are from people in the real world environments. And what we found was that when external interruptions started to decrease, people started to increase the amount of self interruption. And the way I interpret it is that people are just determined to be interrupted, to have short attention spans. And if it's not coming from something outside of them, then it comes from within themselves. And what does this look like? If you're observing someone, you see a person working intently, let's say on a Word document, and then suddenly they switch to check email or switch to look at their phone. And there's no external trigger that you can see. So why do people do this? Well, we've interviewed people, asked them, it's a variety of reasons. So number one, I would say it's habit. People are just habitually used to having short attention spans and they maintain that through self interruption. People also say they, they remember something they forgot to do, so something cues them to look at something else. They have an urge, for example, to look up information. Or some people just feel, well, it's a way to take a break.
- [12:51]
A
Well, I love that you use the word determined because it speaks to something that I've been thinking and writing and talking about for A few years now, which is how much of a shortening attention span is a function of capacity, as it's often talked about, versus motivation, as I tend to see it. And last year, we had Daniel Immervar on the show. He wrote a New Yorker piece you're probably familiar with on the attention crisis being potentially a distraction.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And I think that in some ways, this conversation builds on the chat that I had with Daniel. So we actually reached out to him and asked him to record a question for you, and I'd love to play it for you so you can react. So I want to ask about this notion that we are more and more distracted. On the one hand, that seems intuitively and obviously true. We watch short videos on our phones. Our phones distract us from conversations. I teach college, and students genuinely struggle to read full books in a way that my generation didn't. But I see the other thing, too. I see people playing video games that just, you know, last more than 100 hours. Movies feel like they're longer than they've been. People binge watch television shows sort of hours at a time. And one of the dominant media forms right now is. Is the podcast, which, you know, some of the most popular podcasts just are conversations that can go on for hours. So I guess I see it as both an age of distraction and an age of obsession. Both an age of the short form and the age of a long form. And I'm wondering how you put those two together when you talk about people's shortened attention spans.
- [14:30]
B
It's a great question. So, first of all, let's keep in mind that, yes, films apparently have lengthened, but remember that film directors and editors are designing film to capture our attention. So they're doing what they can to keep people's eyes on that screen. So they know how to create tension. They know how to release tension. So I would argue that directors and editors are doing what they can from a design perspective to keep us involved. Now we can look at films in a different way in terms of shot lengths. And shot lengths have decreased over the years. When film and television first started out, shot lengths were quite long. For example, live tv, you would have a single shot length, and they've decreased in length to roughly about every four seconds. And if you look at blockbuster films, they're about every 2 1/2 seconds that they shift. So that's designed to keep us excited and involved, and it also maps onto our short attention spans, where we're always looking for a change. So, yeah, it's an interesting dichotomy here that in some ways things have gotten longer. But if you look at the other perspective, let's say students who have to read an article for class or a book for class, yes, some books are beautifully written and they can immerse us and keep our attention. But let's face it, when I have assigned pretty dry scientific articles to students, they have a hard time paying attention. So it's not necessarily that the writing is designed to keep them involved. And of course, just look at people's everyday experience being on their computers and phones, they're just faced with an array of potential distractors. So it's very easy for us to distract ourselves or to get notifications and pings.
- [16:50]
A
So putting your perspectives together, what I'm wondering is, do we have a higher threshold for what's worthy of our attention? So we were more tolerant of boredom before or we were less dependent on a hook to keep our interest. And now it might have been that we would have sat with a book for five or 10 minutes when we were bored, or we might have stayed with a movie for the first half hour to see if we liked it. And now if it's a dud in the first minute, I'm moving on because I have lots of other places that I can easily allocate my attention. So one, do you buy that premise? Two, if that is the case, does that mean we actually need to lower the bar and, and get especially students and young people to stop expecting everything to be interesting?
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B
Let's take social media for example, right? There's this competition for our attention and we see a lot of sensationalist content because people who post realize that the more sensational, the more extreme content is, the more likely they are to get people to pay attention to it. So in that sense, I guess we could say that we are habituated in a lot of ways to expect that things are going to attract our attention through extremeness or through change. And that's probably true in films, books, we're expecting more novelty. So I think there might be something to that.
- [18:22]
A
It seems that there are some movements cropping up that are trying to reset this a little bit. I think for sure the weirdest one that I've seen was I've spent some time in Norway and you've probably seen the slow TV movement there where they actually televise a nine hour train ride or a five day boat trip and the entire thing is filmed and shown and people will sit and watch it. And I don't, I mean, that's a bridge too far for me. No pun intended. But I wonder is the appeal of something like that, people saying, I just want to sit with and experience something continuous, something that's not a constant attention switch.
- [19:02]
B
So it reminds me of Andy Warhol's films, right? I think he has a film about someone sleeping. But my response to that is, if you want to experience something more continuous, why watch a film about it? Go outside in nature, take a walk through nature, or sit down with a book and experience the slowness of reading. So there are a lot of different ways that we can slow down other than watching a film about slowness.
- [19:38]
A
This episode is brought to you by National Business Furniture. You can find them@nbf.com I've been thinking about how the environment of our workspaces can help or hinder the way we work. So many organizations claim values like productivity and collaboration, but their spaces are built for a different era of work and tell an entirely different story. The truth is, our surroundings don't just influence how we work. They can have an impact on how we think, how we feel, and who we become while we're there. That's where National Business Furniture comes in. National Business Furniture is built on a simple idea. Every business deserves furniture that lasts, service that cares, and a partner who gets it at a budget that works. For more than 50 years, they've helped companies like yours create spaces that work best. If you want to create a space where people can really thrive, visit nbf.com and use the promo code POD10 to save 10%. That's nbf.com, a better way to Buy office furniture. This episode is powered by AT&T Business. There's something we often don't question until it the invisible systems that support our work. When you're building something, whether it's a business, a team, or an idea, you're constantly making trade offs about where to invest your time and energy. Imagine being hunched over a laptop in a quiet corner of the office, finally hitting your stride, only to have a spinning loading icon bring everything to a halt. It's that split second where the momentum just breaks and you're forced to stop what you're doing to troubleshoot a connection that should have just worked when you're already navigating uncertainty, complexity and competing priorities. Reliability isn't a luxury, it's a foundation. That's what makes AT and T Business a strong provider for small business owners. It's built to work so you can spend less time troubleshooting and more time focusing on the work that actually matters. Powered by AT&T Business Built to Work get today at business.att.com you have the vision for your business. You have the plan, and you just got handed a huge opportunity. But is your business connectivity reliable enough to make a move? Spectrum Business delivers fast, reliable Internet, phone, TV and mobile services, so you're always connected when it matters most. Get connectivity packages built for your business with savings that keep your budget in check. And with fast, reliable Internet and 100% US based customer support, you'll stay connected and ready to bring your vision to life. Learn more@spectrum.com business restrictions apply. Services not available in all areas. So I want to talk about what to do with our relationship with our devices, because I think from the work that you've done, it's pretty clear that we have a hard time managing our devices and end up getting managed by them. And I think you pointed out that there are a few myths that make this worse or that subscribing to a few myths makes it harder for us to have healthy relationships with our devices and manage our attention effectively. So I'd love to walk through the myths with you and just have you talk a little bit about and riff a little bit about what do we do if we reject them? So as I understand it, the first myth is that when we're on a device, a computer primarily, I guess we should always be focused and we should feel guilty if we're not.
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B
Yeah.
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A
You don't agree?
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B
There seems to be this public narrative that we should focus as long as possible and that's how we'll be productive. But that's not how our minds are built. Right. We need to be able to pull back, replenish, take breaks, refresh our mind's limited resources and then we can go back and we can focus a lot more effectively. Right. We can retain the things we're looking at. We can process things more deeply. So, you know, the idea of focusing straight through is that's just not how humans are wired.
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A
You know, I think this reframes how I think about my own writing routine. I think my ideal writing day is one where I start writing the moment that our kids leave for school and I stop the minute they get home. And for a long time I thought about that as, okay, I'm really laser focused on deep work, but when I actually pay attention to what I do as a writer, I take constant breaks. Or only the breaks are just different tasks that are part of the writing process.
- [24:09]
B
Yeah.
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A
So I don't just sit and Write continuously for 8 hours. I will write a paragraph or two and then I realize there's a hole that needs some research. And I'll go and read a bunch of journal articles and then I toggle back to the document and I write up a summary of what I found. And then I'll realize that I'm missing a good story and I'll go searching for stories. And so, like all of these subtasks are feeding into the goal of writing an article or writing a chapter, but they don't require sustained attention on one thing for hours at a time. And I don't feel bad about that. I feel that that's productive. Is that essentially where you're trying to encourage more of us to go?
- [24:47]
B
Yes. Yeah. I think your approach makes perfect sense. That's the way I write as well. Right. But let me also add that it's important to sense when you're starting to feel fatigued, and when you're feeling fatigued, then it's time to step back, take a break, replenish. But yes, you know, moving to different kinds of tasks is just a great way to keep our minds active and keep thinking of new ideas. For myself, when I'm writing, I often get stuck. Right. I don't know where to go next. And that's when I turn and I start reading and I'll read articles because that helps give me new perspective and new ideas. So it's really important to switch around like that.
- [25:37]
A
I've come to think also that sequencing is important. So Jihe Shin and I published a paper a number of years ago on how if you're doing a highly interesting task, if you follow that with a fairly boring task, your performance on the boring task will suffer because the contrast between the work you loved and now the mind numbing, just misery that you're experiencing is too great. And so I've tried to treat interesting tasks as a reward for kind of powering through my most boring tasks, or taper a little bit and say, okay, in between the exciting and the boring. But important is going to be a moderately interesting task so that the contrast isn't quite so severe. I'm curious about whether you have other recommendations on sequencing to maintain attention.
- [26:22]
B
Yeah. So we found in our research that people have different kinds of attention. And let me explain what I mean by that. There are some activities that people do where they're just highly engaged and challenged and that might be reading a difficult article or writing. But a lot of things we do, we're really engaged, but we're not challenged at all. So that could be stepping back and doing a silly mind game or doing solitaire. Maya Angelou talked about her big mind and her little mind. And her big mind was what she used for her deep, creative work, her little mind. She would step back and do crossword puzzles or play solitaire. So she also did this kind of sequencing where she switched between her deep, focused work and work where she was engaged but not challenged. That kind of helped her mind settle down and replenish. And sometimes it makes sense to let ourselves be bored, like you mentioned. And we define boredom as not being challenged and not being engaged. And that's not such a bad idea at times.
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A
Okay, this goes right to your second myth, which has to do with flow. And I have to say, this was a big rethinking moment for me when I was reading your book, because I guess I've been reading about flow for 25 years. It's shown up in some of my research. I've always thought about it as the optimal state of engagement, just as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi first described it when he coined the term. And you really pushed me to think again because you question whether, in fact, flow is the ideal state when we're using technology. Walk me through why.
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B
Yeah. So, first of all, the task has a lot to do with it. When we think about flow, it's really an ideal combination of being challenged and using your skill, and you get into the state where you're so immersed that time just doesn't seem to matter. Before I studied psychology, I was an artist, and I would readily get into flow. I would be working in my studio, and before I knew it, many hours had gone by. It was the middle of the night. Where did the time go? I was in flow, and that's why I didn't realize what was going on. So I actually started out assuming that people, when they do knowledge work on their devices, would also get into a state of flow. But in interviewing people, I found that it rarely happens, and I attribute it to the kind of work that we typically do. Now, a coder can get into flow because it's the nature of their task. If a person is composing music, they can get into flow. And sometimes writing on your computer, you can get into flow. But for the typical kind of work that knowledge workers do, a lot of it is doing analytical thinking, decision making. So it's a very different kind of process than the kind of thinking that can lead to a flow state.
- [29:47]
A
Something has always puzzled me, though, about flow, which is like Mihaly was Very clear in his original theory that challenge is important. But he presented data suggesting that most of us find flow when driving on the freeway regularly, which is not a challenging task most of the time that you're doing it.
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B
Right.
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A
And I've also, I've read, I think, about Ryan Quinn's research, for example, on flow and conversation, that a lot of people find flow talking about issues that, you know, might be interesting to them. But the conversation isn't necessarily intellectually taxing. It's not demanding, it's not challenging in the traditional sense. And so that has led me to wonder, is challenge actually necessary for flow? Hmm.
- [30:34]
B
Well, I guess the other way to think about it is, are these activities you're talking about really flow, or are they something else? So if you're driving, a lot of that is just automatic processing, Right? And I'm not sure we can call that really flow. And that's why you can drive and have a conversation with a passenger, because you're not using your cognitive resources to pay attention to the road. But as soon as a car cuts you off, you stop talking with the passenger because you have to allocate resources to figure out how to not crash into that car. And, you know, with a conversation, I would say, is that flow? If you're just having fun with someone, you're having a really simple conversation. It could be. But I've also talked with people who describe flow in conversations, for example, during brainstorming, where they're needing to think and tax those their minds muscles. And then they'll hear another idea that they're get really excited about. And to me, that's a better representation of flow in a conversation.
- [31:56]
A
Why? Is it because the absorption is deeper?
- [31:59]
B
I mean, it's hard to know if the absorption is deeper, but I would say that people are exercising their minds a little bit more. They're thinking a little more deeply. And so in a sense, they're challenging themselves a little bit more than, you know. I mean, of course, having a simple conversation with someone is. It's a lot of fun. I'm not exactly sure that I would call that flow according to what Sheikhs and Mahaly defined as flow.
- [32:31]
A
Fair. Yeah. I think there's an element of goal orientation that the task has a purpose as opposed to. It's just fun.
- [32:38]
B
Yes.
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A
Okay, so let's go back to knowledge work then. I find your argument persuasive that the structure of most knowledge jobs is not conducive to flow. You may have tasks that are, but your overall role will not necessarily Put you in flow four or five hours a day. So what is the ideal attentional state if it's not flow?
- [33:01]
B
I would say the ideal attentional state is depth of processing, which could be a precursor to flow, could get you into flow or not. But it's being able to deeply think about something. And you know, again, it could lead to some great idea or it could just, it could lead to solving a mathematical equation. Right. But it does lead to something. But as a result of thinking more deeply, we also tend to retain information better. So we connect whatever that thing is we're reasoning deeply about to our own store of knowledge and expanding it. And I think that's really what's important.
- [33:52]
A
It's interesting to me that you said thinking more deeply and not also more broadly.
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B
Also more broadly, I don't want to exclude that. It's also very important to do divergent thinking where we think of lots of different ideas. In fact, as you know, thinking has both a divergent component and a convergent component. Both of those are really important.
- [34:19]
A
So it seems like though, from what we've covered, we're not struggling from an attentional breadth perspective as much as we are from a depth perspective. We're getting lots of broad stimuli into our days.
- [34:30]
B
Yeah, I would agree with that. Yeah.
- [34:32]
A
Okay, so if the goal is then to improve our capacity for depth or, you know, build the habit of going deeper and maybe focusing longer, where do we start?
- [34:44]
B
Well, I have been doing a lot of interviews with people where I ask them to walk me through a day and how does technology fit into your day? And I think that's a really good place to start because people can become aware, like, oh, the first thing I do in the morning is reach for my phone before I even look out the window. And I don't even get natural sunlight. And then they can start to realize what's going on. Oh, and I carry my phone with me into the bathroom and then I'm sitting at the breakfast table in front of a screen and then throughout the day I'm checking social media. So it's really important to do a kind of self examination of how you're using technology and is it working for you? Is that the best way to be using it? Is it getting you stressed?
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A
One of the things I've discovered when doing that is there's a surprising power of understanding your own chronotype.
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B
Yes.
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A
And I know you know a lot about this. My simple aha from digging into the research and also just watching my own patterns was that I was much more focused in the morning than the afternoon. And not surprisingly, I turn out to be a morning person, not a night owl. And so what I tried to do then was shift a lot of my creative and analytical work to the mornings and then say, okay, I'm going to take meetings in the afternoons and I'll catch up on emails at night. And that cadence has worked pretty well. Seems like it's much harder for somebody who's a night owl to be able to cater to their chronotype. And I wonder if you have any thoughts on that. Is that just protecting late afternoons?
- [36:24]
B
We've actually done research on this and we used an experience sampling approach, which is the very same method that Sheikhs and Haly used where we asked people, you know, at the moment you received this electronic probe, how challenged were you and how engaged were you? And we interrupted people a lot throughout the day. And the irony does not escape me that we were interrupting people, but we found that people's focused attention, which I define as being both challenged and engaged, has certain patterns that show peaks and valleys throughout the day. So we see these rhythms and of course there are individual differences like there are with most things in psychology. And people who are early types in their chronotype, their attentional peaks are much earlier in the day. People who are late types, of course, their peaks are much later in the day. We actually find two peaks. There's a peak in the morning and then there's a valley around lunchtime, there's another peak in mid afternoon. And so I always argue that first of all, discover when your attentional peak is. It's easy, it's not hard. You can do journaling and figure it out and arrange to do those tasks that require the most work and the most creativity at those times when your attention is at its peak. And don't squander that time by doing email or reading the news or looking at social media. But that's how we can be productive, is to find that best moment for you when your attention is in full capacity and use it wisely.
- [38:21]
A
Well, okay, so this goes to the popular idea of the digital detox. I think the most interesting paper I've read on this in the last few years is one I'm sure you've come across. It was an experiment by Julia Brylovskaya and colleagues where they compare digital abstinence with digital moderation effectively. And I think the gist of the experiment for our listeners who aren't familiar is one group of hundreds of people is randomly assigned to take a seven day, total refrain from social media and smartphone use, and just cut off cold turkey. Then there's another group that's just asked to decrease their smartphone use by one hour a day. And four months later, the moderation group is happier, less depressed, less anxious, and even leads a healthier lifestyle. They're less likely to smoke, for example, than the abstinence group. And so I came away from that thinking, okay, maybe we don't need to cut off cold turkey. Maybe that just requires too much willpower for people and then they just revert back to their old habits after the detox. Maybe smaller changes are more sustainable and that's where we should be focusing. What do you think? You're the expert.
- [39:34]
B
I am not a fan of digital detox because to me it's like a crash diet. So what I think is a lot more effective, and what this experiment demonstrates is for people to change their routines, they change their practice in life. And so by cutting down social media or smartphone use an hour each day, it's rewiring their routines, and that's more permanent. Right? And it's just so much more effective and important for people to change the way that they're using technology to be able to integrate it into their lives and in a way that's long lasting. So it's not a quick fix like a digital detox, but it's really, they're thinking in the long term.
- [40:33]
A
I love that. So when it comes to rewiring our routines, you are not completely opposed to daydreaming. And I was a little surprised by that because it seems like the opposite of the deep, focused attention that we've been talking about. So tell me why that should be part of our routine and what it looks like.
- [40:52]
B
Well, sometimes people can get their greatest ideas from mind wandering. And there's also this psychological idea that if you let a problem incubate, like you really are faced with a tough problem, and then you just kind of step away, you let your mind move on to something else, and then you come back to it, you see it with fresh eyes. And so it is known in neuroscience that our mind, even if we're not focused on something, it's still working, right? We're still having thoughts, and it might even be working on that problem that we may not be consciously thinking of. So mind wandering can actually have benefits for us.
- [41:35]
A
I think that's persuasive. This episode is sponsored by Kohler Smart Toilets. The objects we interact with most are often the ones we notice least. Kohler's Smart Toilet challenges that assumption. What if the most overlooked space in your home could become the most considered? Their Vail Smart Toilet is a sculptural silhouette that isn't just intentional, it's a philosophy that design changes everything. The Kohler Vail Smart Toilet is sleek with a rounded shape that's more like architecture than just plumbing. And it goes beyond looks. The touchscreen controls and customizable cleansing features offer a level of comfort and cleanliness that exceed expectations. It's all about elevating those ordinary daily rituals into something extraordinary through thoughtful design. Kohler has been pushing these boundaries for over 150 years, mastering that balance of stunning form and high performance function that's a long time to get it right, and it shows in every detail. Experience the difference of Kohler Smart Toilets. Find out more@kohler.com this episode is sponsored by the Amazon Kindle Scribe up until now, people have had to choose between the focus that comes from writing on paper and and the efficiency of laptops and tablets, which might come at the cost of distracting pop ups and notifications. The Kindle Scribe's exciting new AI features are designed to streamline your workflow for maximum efficiency, but what's not on it is just as important. Scribe comes with no email, messaging or social apps, so you can unlock your best focus. Use Scribe's AI notebook insights to ask your notebook a question and instantly comb through handwritten notes for fast answers. Or pull up and Mark PDFs with PDF markup right on your screen. No printer necessary. The Kindle Scribe makes it easy to keep your notes organized with everything you need in one place without having to sort through paper files or type notes on your laptop. I love how the Kindle Scribe brings my notes to life while making them impossible to lose. I know what I'm working on moving forward. What are you working on? Kindle Scribe this is Ayo Akemwaleere from the Athletic FC Podcast. Buying a car should be exciting, not exhausting. And if you're looking for a gleaming SUV to replace your old banger, or you're taking the plunge and going electric, the good news is you can buy your car completely online on Autotrader. Really? Just go to autotrader.com and get picky. Search through dealer listings for the make, model, color and the features that matter to you. Then just drop in your info and you'll see all the cars that fit your budget. Really? Once you've found the car of your dreams, you can have it delivered to your driveway or you can pick it up at the dealership really. So buy your next car entirely online on autotrader. Head to autotrader.com or search the Autotrader app. Let us go to a lightning round. First one is what do you think is the best advice you can offer that we haven't covered yet?
- [44:34]
B
Paying attention to those things in life that can bring us deeper happiness and well being.
- [44:44]
A
What is something you've rethought or changed your mind about recently?
- [44:48]
B
So this isn't so recent, but when I wrote the book, I talked about rote activity as having benefits for us. And there are some benefits. It makes us happy, but we can go too far with it. We can go down a rabbit hole with doing some activity that's mindless and makes us happy. So I would like to restate what I'm saying and really do it in moderation.
- [45:16]
A
Do you have a guideline for how long mindless activity should last before we re engage our conscious attention?
- [45:24]
B
I don't have a set time, but by no means should it interfere with your work, other individuals, or your life. And if it starts doing that, then stop it.
- [45:37]
A
Great. Okay, over to you. Office hours, time. Do you have a puzzle, a problem, a question?
- [45:44]
B
For me, I do. What I'm seeing is that people are stopping, putting in effort where it matters, what I call constructive effort, and as a result, they're losing capabilities. What worries me is about AI, that people can all too easily defer mental capabilities to AI. So what can we do? How can we get people to learn to recognize that putting in effort can benefit them?
- [46:23]
A
Such an important question. I think I have two thoughts on this. The first one is I've been reading a bunch of research suggesting that the easiest way to motivate effort is not pleasure, it's purpose. Because often the act of putting effort into a task is a little unpleasant. And so trying to add joy is not that easy. But reminding people that, you know, there's something of value at stake, I think is effective in a lot of ways. I think the other thing I would say on this is, you know, I start thinking about Robert Eisenberger's theory of learned industriousness. And the basic aha from Eisenberger was that when we reward effort repeatedly, effort itself starts to take on secondary reward properties. It's like a form of classical conditioning. And I know I've experienced that running on the treadmill, for example. I don't like running. And yet what I've tried to do is, number one, give myself a favorite task or treat. Afterward, when I hit my running goal and number two, pair it with a favorite TV show that I'm only allowed to watch when I'm on the treadmill. And over time, I don't want to say I've started to look forward to running, but it's less aversive, and I find myself sticking with the habit more. And I think there's something there. It reminds me a little bit of Katie Milkman's work on Temptation Bundling, where she would lock a favorite audiobook or movie at the gym, and then you had to go to get the reward. And I don't think that should be the ongoing way that we motivate, but I think initially. Right. If that act of effort is really taxing, to associate it with something more positive maybe shifts our view of it a little bit. I don't know. What do you think?
- [48:10]
B
Well, what I'm wondering about is we've entered this era of AI and the purpose is that people want to get a document written or they want a summary of a document. So the purpose for them is really clear. I think they're losing sight of the purpose of learning or the work of using their mind, using their working memory to expand. So I think that the purpose is somehow getting.
- [48:43]
A
I think that's right. Gloria, it's been such a pleasure to have you on. Thank you for coming to Rethinking.
- [48:49]
B
Thank you so much for inviting me.
- [48:54]
A
Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by Ted with Cosmic Standard. Our producer is Jessica Glaser. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson. Our technical director is Jacob Winick, and our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Hylash, Banban Chang, Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sung Manivong, and Whitney Pennington Rogers. Original music by Hans Dale Su and Alison Layton. Brown.
- [49:24]
B
Ping. Hannah, I just Venmo'd you for dinner. Obsessed. I'm spending it right now in the lip gloss that's been sitting. Sitting in my cart. What do you mean, spending it right now? You can instantly spend your balance with the Venmo debit card or when you pay with Venmo at checkout. Stop. Say more. More. Exactly. The more you do with Venmo, the more you get, like, earning up to 5% cash. Back with Venmo stash. Get the Venmo debit card or checkout online. Venmo stash bundle terms and exclusions apply. Max $100 per month. See terms at Venmo Me Stash terms. Venmo checkout not available at all merchants. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp A
- [50:13]
A
Yep, he's planning another project so this Father's Day at Lowe's, tap into free gifts for dad. Get a free select Craftsman Power tool when you buy a Craftsman V20 charger with 2amp hour and 4amp hour batteries. Plus get a free Dewalt power tool when you buy a select 20 volt max XR 4amp hour battery kit. Dad knows our best lineup is here at Lowe's valid through 714 while supplies last selection varies by location.
- [50:41]
B
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- [51:11]
A
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