Not getting the message

Attention spans are plummeting as desk workers juggle incoming pings, beeps and social media distractions. Is tech destroying our focus – at work and at home?

- SARAH CATHERALL

When Philly Powell went on holiday, the then HR adviser at Chorus did something almost radical. Rather than sending an out-of-office automatic reply, she told those who contacted her that their emails would be automatically wiped. "Thanks for your email, I've deleted it, I'm on holiday. If it is urgent, please get back to me after [this date]," she wrote.

Wellington-based Powell is part of global moves to try to get control back over the pings, notifications, multiple screens and screeds of emails and messages flying back and forth in the workplace. Technology was supposed to aid our jobs and our lives, but a growing body of research shows it is having the opposite effect - it is exhausting us.

According to an extensive study by Gloria Mark, a US psychologist and professor of "informatics", workers check their emails on average 77 times a day. Mark has spent thousands of hours studying people in the workplace over the decades, and has come to some harsh conclusions, which she reveals in a new book, Attention Span: Finding focus for a fulfilling life. Her conclusion? People are overworked and exhausted because they have to deal with too much information and too many messages.

In 2004, we could hold our attention on a screen for 2.5 minutes. Almost two decades later, that time has slumped to 47 seconds before we are distracted by something on another screen, she says.

The biggest culprit amid the alerts and notifications interrupting our workday is email. Even though workplaces are increasingly using other communication programmes such as Slack and Teams, the University of California, Irvine, academic says her research has found a direct correlation between email and higher stress loads. "Email has become a symbol of work," she says.