Forty-seven seconds: why your focus keeps breaking, and how to win it back

You probably know the feeling. You sit down to work on the one important thing, and an hour later you have answered emails, checked a report, glanced at the news and read three messages. The important thing has barely moved.

That is not just a personal failing. As I read the research, it is partly the way modern work is organised, and some of the research points to small, cheap changes that may help.

Attention spans have shrunk

Gloria Mark, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine, has studied how people use computers at work since the early 2000s. Her first study, published in 2004, found that people spent an average of about two and a half minutes on one screen before switching. Studies from 2016 to 2020 put the average at 47 seconds.

She makes a second point that is easy to miss. About half the time, she says, we interrupt ourselves. The distractions are not only coming from outside.

Interruptions cost stress, not just time

The cost of interruptions is not what most people assume. In a 2008 experiment, 48 people answered a set of emails in the role of an HR manager while a "supervisor" interrupted them by phone or instant message about every two minutes. Interrupted people finished faster than when they were left alone, and their work was no worse.

They paid in other ways. When interrupted, they reported more stress, frustration, time pressure and effort. The researchers concluded that people "compensate for interruptions by working faster, but this comes at a price". My reading is that a team can look productive on a day of constant interruptions while wearing itself out.

Why the last task stays with you

The bigger cost may come after the switch. In 2009 Sophie Leroy, a business professor, showed that when people move from one task to another, part of their attention stays behind. She called this "attention residue". People who still had the first task on their mind did worse on the next one. Even finishing the first task did not help, unless they had finished it against a deadline.

In later work with Theresa Glomb, published in 2018, she tested a fix. Before switching, people spent about a minute writing a "ready-to-resume plan": where they had stopped, what was left to do and what they would come back to. Those who wrote the plan had less residue and made better decisions on the task that interrupted them.

Multitasking is still mostly switching

The idea that people can do two things at once has had some recent support, but less than the headlines suggest. A 2026 study found that the brain briefly tracks two conversations at once while switching attention between them, but it measured brain signals, not whether people understood both. Another found that after weeks of practice, more than 30,000 trials, a trained task could run alongside a second one. The lead researcher stressed that texting while driving will never be safe, because your eyes leave the road.

My reading is that for the kinds of demanding work most leaders do, doing two things at once still means switching between them, with the costs above.

The phone on the desk

One famous 2017 study claimed that simply having your phone on the desk, even switched off, reduced your mental capacity. It is widely quoted. A later replication with 302 participants found no overall effect of where the phone was. Even so, the replication's authors advised against keeping phones on desks at work, pointing to other evidence that personally important objects can distract. My reading is that the effect is uncertain, and moving the phone costs nothing.

Even clever people miss the obvious

Focused people miss things. In two large online studies published in 2026, around 2,000 people did tasks that required close attention while an unexpected object appeared on screen. Depending on the task, only 39% to 66% noticed it. Neither intelligence nor personality reliably predicted who would. My reading is that the more focused a leader is on one thing, the more they need someone else watching for what they are not looking at.

Move before the hard work

One simple habit may help. In a 2026 study, 51 men, both young and older, either walked or jogged on a treadmill for 20 minutes or sat and watched a video. After exercise, they were faster on a demanding attention test, with no loss of accuracy. The study had limits: only men, a single session and no test before each session, so it cannot say how long the benefit lasts.

What this is costing you

None of these studies looked at your organisation, so applying them is my own step. Some of these patterns may be familiar where you work:

• the culture where any message is expected to get a reply within minutes;
• the day of back-to-back meetings with no time to finish anything between them;
• the important project that only moves in the evening, when the messages stop;
• the review where everyone focused on the numbers and nobody noticed the obvious risk.

The cost is rarely visible on the day. It shows up in stress, in important work that moves slowly and in things nobody noticed.

Questions worth asking

A few honest questions show how this applies to you.

• When did you last spend an hour on one task without switching?
• How many of your interruptions today came from yourself?
• How quickly does your team expect a reply to a message?
• Who on your team is watching for the things everyone else is too focused to see?

What you can do this week

Everything in this section is a suggestion of mine, drawn from the research rather than tested by it. Each one takes minutes and costs nothing.

Suggestion

If you lead a team

• Agree quiet time. Set aside a block each day when the team does not send or expect messages.
• Slow down replies. Tell the team that a reply within hours, not minutes, is fine for anything that is not urgent.
• Leave gaps between meetings. Give people time to finish and note the next step before the next meeting starts.
• Ask before you interrupt. When you need someone, ask whether now is a good time, or send a note for later.
• Name a watcher. In big reviews, ask one person to look only for what everyone else might be missing.

Suggestion

For yourself

• Write today's goal where you can see it. Attention follows goals; a note on your desk helps.
• Do the hardest work at your best time. Notice when you focus best, and protect that time for the most demanding task.
• Write a one-minute plan before you switch. Note where you stopped and what comes next before you move to something else.
• Move the phone. Put it out of sight while you work on something important.
• Move first. Before your most demanding task, take a brisk walk; the study used 20 minutes at a pace that raised the heart rate.

Suggestion

At home

These are ideas of mine, not tested with children.

• One thing at a time. During homework, put phones and tablets in another room.
• Move before homework. Try a short walk or active game before homework, and see whether it helps.

Sources

• Mark, G., as interviewed in University of California News, "How to sharpen your attention and meet your goals", 2024. See also Mark, G. (2023). Attention Span. Hanover Square Press.
• Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '08).
• Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2).
• Leroy, S., & Glomb, T. M. (2018). Tasks interrupted: How anticipating time pressure on resumption of an interrupted task causes attention residue and low performance on interrupting tasks and how a "ready-to-resume" plan mitigates the effects. Organization Science, 29(3), 380 to 397.
• López Valdés, A., Aličković, E., Di Liberto, G. M., Zaar, J., & Carta, S. Competing speech streams are simultaneously represented in the human cortex during attention switching. PLOS Biology. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.3003876
• Cox, P. H., Scholl, C. A., Laws, M. L., Jaimes, N. E., Jiang, X., & Riesenhuber, M. Extensive experience remodels neural task circuitry to escape the frontal bottleneck and increase automaticity of categorization. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2026). doi:10.1162/JOCN.a.2618
• Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A., & Bos, M. W. (2017). Brain drain: The mere presence of one's own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. doi:10.1086/691462
• Hartmann, M., Martarelli, C. S., Reber, T. P., & Rothen, N. (2020). Replication of the smartphone "brain drain" study, Consciousness and Cognition. Reported by the British Psychological Society Research Digest.
• Simons, D. J., Ding, Y., Hults, C. M., & Roberts, B. W. (2026). Do individual differences in cognitive ability or personality predict noticing in inattentional blindness tasks? Royal Society Open Science. doi:10.1098/rsos.260708
• Wang, K.-P., Chen, L.-J., Yu, C.-L., Chen, D.-T., Hung, T.-M., & Hsieh, S.-S. (2026). Moving the body or watching the screen: 20-minute exercise modulates brain activity and enhances cognitive performance in younger and older male adults. Mental Health and Physical Activity. doi:10.1016/j.mhpa.2026.100760