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

Rediscover your ability to pay attention with this groundbreaking new approach from "the definitive expert on distraction and multitasking" (Cal Newport).We spend an average of just 47 seconds on any screen before shifting our attention. It takes 25 minutes to bring our attention back to a task after an interruption. And we interrupt ourselves more than we're interrupted by others.In Attention Span, psychologist Gloria Mark reveals these and more surprising results from her decades of research into how technology affects our attention. She shows how much of what we think we know is wrong, including insights such as: Why multitasking hurts rather than helps productivity, How social media and modern entertainment amplify our short attention spans, What drains our mental resources and how to refuel them, and The four types of attention that we experience every day and how to recognize them. While the concept of "flow" has previously been considered the ideal state of focus, Dr. Mark offers a new framework to help explain how our brains function in the digital world: kinetic attention. This audiobook reveals how we can take control, not only to find more success in our careers, but also to find health and wellness in our everyday lives.

About the Author :
Dr. Gloria Mark is Chancellor's Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She has been a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research since 2012. She is a two-time recipient of the Google Research Award and has received a prestigious NSF CAREER award. She has previously held positions as a visiting research scientist at the Boeing Company, a senior research scientist at the German National Research Center for Information Technology and a visiting senior researcher for IBM Haifa, the largest lab of IBM's Research division outside the US. She has had over two hundred papers published in the top journals in the fields of human-computer interactions (HCI) and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). Dr. Mark received her PhD from Columbia University in psychology. She was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2017 in recognition of her leadership and contribution in HCI. She has been a Fulbright scholar and has received a prestigious NSF CAREER grant. She was general cochair of the top conferences of ACM CHI 2017, was papers chair of ACM CSCW 2012 and ACM CSCW 2006, and currently serves as associate editor of the top-tier journals ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction and Human-Computer Interaction. Original bio sent from Cassandra: Cassandra Campbell began doing voice overs as the voice for Calvin Klein's Italian commercials. This was followed by commercial and documentary recording in both English and Italian. She has recorded many audiobooks and has received several AudioFile Earphones Awards as well as an Audie(R) Award nomination. As an actress and director, she has worked at the Public, the Mint, the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Stagewest, Theatreworks, the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, Millmountain Theatre, the National Shakespeare Company, and the New York Fringe Festival.

Review :
"Interruptions are a fact of life. This has long been true, no fancy technology required, but today, we have bright, shiny technology, some deliberately designed to distract and thereby to interrupt. Gloria Mark's book is a thorough review of the impact these interruptions have on our lives and mental health. Some interruptions are welcomed, deliberately self-created. Most, however, are not. All interruptions impact the focus of attention, and attention is a critically limiting aspect of human cognition. Don't be distracted by my review--go read the book. It is an important and valuable contribution to living in this world of interruptions." -- "Don Norman, bestselling author" "This book covers decades of Gloria Mark's fascinating research journey into how the rise of computing has affected our personal lives: how we are overstressed, we multitask too much, we are constantly interrupted even by ourselves, and our attention spans have declined to an astonishing 47 seconds. If you are interested in your well-being and how to gain agency in this digital age, then you need to read this book." -- "Susan David, bestselling author" "Gloria Mark is the definitive expert on distraction and multitasking in our increasingly digital world." -- "Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author"