Forty-seven seconds: how short your attention span has become

The headline number in the modern science of attention is small enough to fit on a wristwatch.

Forty-seven seconds.

That is the average uninterrupted stretch of focused attention an office worker spends on a single task at a computer before switching to something else, according to the longest-running study of the question we have. It used to be 150 seconds. It is not a meme, it is not a tabloid stat, and it is not the goldfish-comparison the internet likes to circulate. It is real, measured data, gathered over twenty years by one researcher.

This piece is about who she is, how she measured it, what the number actually means, and what to do about it.

Who Gloria Mark is

Dr Gloria Mark is a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the most-cited researchers in the field of human-computer interaction. Since the early 2000s she has been measuring something almost everyone else in technology research has ignored: how long the average person actually focuses on a single thing at a screen, in their real working life, before switching.

The methodology, simplified: a study participant goes about their normal work at a normal screen. Their activity is logged. Every time they switch from one application or document to another, a switch event is recorded. The duration between switches is the “attention stretch.” Average it across thousands of stretches and you get a figure for that population in that period.

In her 2004 work she reported an average of approximately 150 seconds.^[1]

In her 2008 follow-up the figure had fallen.^[3]

In her 2023 book, Attention Span, she presented the longitudinal trajectory in full. By 2012 the average had reached 75 seconds. By 2021 it was 47 seconds.^[2]

What the number does and does not say

The 47-second figure does not say that no human in 2021 could focus for longer than 47 seconds. It is an average across stretches. Many stretches are longer. Some are much shorter. What the number captures is the typical gap between context switches in modern computer-based work.

The decline is striking on its own. What is more striking is what changed alongside it. In 2004, almost all interruptions in the studies were external: a notification, a colleague, a phone ringing. By 2021, a substantial proportion of interruptions were self-initiated: the worker switching tabs without external prompting, checking something, refreshing a feed, checking the phone next to the keyboard.

This is the key point about modern attention erosion. The trained behaviour is now internal. We have become our own interrupters. The smartphone is not in the room any more; the smartphone has been internalised.

Why it matters

A 47-second attention stretch is not enough time to think a complete long thought. It is not enough time to settle into a difficult passage of text, to construct a multi-step argument, to plan a complex piece of work, or to hold a long question in mind while looking for the answer.

The research on the cost of constant context-switching is consistent. Larry Rosen and colleagues at California State University have shown that switching attention to a notification or a brief text message imposes a measurable cost on the task one returns to: comprehension drops, error rates rise, completion times extend.^[4] The effect compounds with frequency.

There is also a wellbeing dimension. Matt Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert ran a large-scale experience-sampling study in 2010 using an app that pinged participants at random moments asking what they were doing and how they felt.^[5] They collected over 250,000 data points across thousands of participants. The headline finding was simple: a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. People reported lower wellbeing when their attention was scattered than when it was settled, regardless of what they were actually doing.

(There is a subtle but important caveat to that study: not all mind-wandering is the same. Productive mind-wandering, of the default-network kind that generates ideas, is different from the anxious, distracted, jumping-between-things wandering that the phone trains. The Killingsworth result is mostly about the second kind.)

What to do

There is no silver bullet for reversing twenty years of trained attentional erosion in a single intervention. There is, however, a small number of consistent, evidence-supported moves:

• Remove the most-frequent self-interrupter from the environment. For most people, this is the phone in the same room as the work. Move it. Do not “put it on silent.” Move it to another room. The internal pull weakens within days.
• Batch notifications. Almost no notification, including work ones, actually needs to be delivered the second it arrives. Setting “do not disturb” windows of even one hour at a time triples the average attention stretch in studies on knowledge work.
• Practise sustained-attention activities deliberately. Reading on paper. Long walks with no audio input. Writing by hand. The deep-attention circuit responds to use within weeks.
• Stop using “five-minute breaks” to scroll. The instinct is to think the break is recovery. It is not. The scroll keeps the attentional system in interruption mode. Genuine recovery is doing nothing for the five minutes.

The 47-second figure is not destiny. It is an aggregate of an environment we have built that interrupts us, plus a trained behaviour where we have learned to interrupt ourselves. Both of those can be changed, and the data on rehabilitation is encouraging.

For the longer argument, the small book this studio publishes — How to Be Bored Again — sits at the centre of this question. The first half of the book is the diagnosis, the second half is the practice. Twelve short chapters. About a long evening's read.

There is a small, almost humorous test of where your own attention is right now: try reading the previous paragraph of this article again, without checking anything else, and see whether you make it. If you did, you have already begun.