We now switch screens every 47 seconds

Picture an old radio on a kitchen shelf. One station at a time. To change it, you turn a dial, slowly, and the music drifts through static until it finds the next song. Nobody flicks between forty stations in a minute. The dial won’t let you.

Our phones have no dial.

Twenty years with a stopwatch#

Since the early 2000s, Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, has been timing how long people stay on one screen before switching to another. Not in a lab, but at their desks, logging their real work.

In 2003, the average was about two and a half minutes. By 2012, it had fallen to 75 seconds. In the years since about 2016, it’s been around 47 seconds, and the most common figure, the median, is just 40.

Mark is careful about what this means. It doesn’t show our brains have shrunk. It measures how often we switch: a habit, shaped by everything on the screen competing for the next look.

The goldfish that never was#

You may have heard that humans now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish: 8 seconds against the fish’s 9. It’s quoted in talks, books and adverts.

It isn’t true. In 2017, the BBC’s statistics programme More or Less went looking for the source. The figure had appeared in a 2015 Microsoft Canada report, which took it from a website. The sources that website named had no record of the research. An attention researcher they spoke to said an “average attention span” is meaningless, because it depends on the task. As for the goldfish, they’re a standard animal for studying memory.

We don’t need the myth. Mark’s real numbers are striking enough.

Opening the oven door#

Every interruption has a cost beyond the moment itself. In one of Mark’s studies of office workers, published in 2005, people who were interrupted took about 25 minutes, on average, to get back to the task. Usually they did two other things in between.

You’ve probably heard this as “it takes 23 minutes to refocus”. That figure comes from a 2006 interview about the same research, and it’s usually misquoted. It isn’t 23 minutes of staring at the wall. It’s the time it takes to find your way back, after the interruption has led you somewhere else.

Think of baking a cake. Every time you open the oven door to check, heat escapes, and the oven needs time to climb back up. Open it once, and the cake is fine. Open it every few minutes, and it never quite bakes.

How often we open the door#

In a small 2015 study at the University of Lincoln, researchers logged people’s real phone use for two weeks. On average, they used their phones about 85 times a day. Asked to guess, people estimated around 37, less than half the real number. More than half of all those uses lasted under 30 seconds.

Many of those checks weren’t chosen. They were prompted: a buzz, a badge, a sound designed to pull us back.

Fewer, kinder interruptions#

Europe has started to take this seriously at work. France gave employees a right to disconnect from work messages outside working hours in 2017. Portugal went further in 2021, making it a duty for employers not to contact staff during their rest time, except in emergencies.

At home, the research points the same way. In a 2019 experiment, people who received their phone notifications bundled three times a day felt more attentive, less stressed and more in control than people who received them as usual. Switching notifications off altogether didn’t help: those people felt more anxious about missing something.

The lesson isn’t silence. It’s fewer interruptions, at times you choose, from people who matter.

How Philos treats your attention#

That’s how we designed notifications on Philos. Only people talking to you make a sound. Posts and Moments never notify you; they wait until you open the app. Quiet hours start on, from 22:00 to 07:00, and messages wait for one gentle note in the morning, unless they’re from a Circle you let through. And Home ends, so there’s always a moment to put the phone down.

Tonight, try one experiment: turn off notifications for one app you don’t need to hear from. See how many times you reach for your phone tomorrow without it.

Questions people ask

What is the average attention span on a screen?

In Gloria Mark's workplace studies, people switched screens after about 47 seconds on average in recent years, down from about 2.5 minutes in 2003. That measures switching, not a fixed limit of the brain.

Is it true that a goldfish has a longer attention span than people?

No. The 8-second figure came from a website, not a study, and the BBC's More or Less couldn't trace it to any research.

How long does it take to refocus after an interruption?

In Gloria Mark's studies, people took about 23 to 25 minutes on average to return to an interrupted task, usually after working on two other things in between.