Attention Span

Book review for Attention Span by Gloria Mark. I rated it 3.5 stars This book came with a rather bold subtitle - “A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity”. In it, author Gloria Mark refers to some rather rather in-depth time studies she has done to discover when and how people are getting distracted. My interest was piqued when she calls out the state of being in “flow"" (a term that comes from one of favourite books) as a bit of a productivity myth and not realistic for many office workers who have to do a lot of busy admin-type work. The second point that further piqued my interest was Mark’s claim that actually, spending your time doing non-productive things like scrolling social media (which she calls “rote attention”) is not actually a bad thing. One might think that if you are not able to achieve a flow state due to the nature of your work that you should try and restructure your job in such a way that you can have more flow time. Instead Mark accepts…