Are You or Your Child Suffering From Fragmented Attention?

“Spending the majority of your day with fragmented attention can permanently affect your ability to sustain concentration.”

This is something that Cal Newport, associate professor at Georgetown University, said in a TED Talk about why he has never had a social media account and why he turns off his notifications while he’s working on a project.

He talks and writes about the impact that social media and multiple sources of information have on our work habits, productivity, and ability to concentrate. His premise is that jumping from email to Facebook to Slack feed, whether at work or at home, impairs our ability to actually do what we need to do in an efficient way as well as affecting our overall ability to sustain attention.

He calls shifting from doing a task at work to looking at an email a “context shift.” In an interview in the New York Times Magazine (January 29, 2023), he said that “even minor context shifts are poison”—by which he meant that if you are writing a report at work and you stop to check a text message, there will be a cost to your productivity. You will have to exert a large amount of mental energy to go from that message back to the report you were writing. And if you do this multiple times while writing the report, you will take longer and have to work harder to finish it.

And he did not make this up.

Scientists have found this over and over again. For example, Professor Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert on divided attention, says, “your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. “We’re very, very single-minded.” We have “very limited cognitive capacity.”

But, he says, we have fallen for an enormous delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow six forms of media at the same time. When neuroscientists studied this, they found that when people believe they are doing several things at once, they are actually juggling. “They’re switching back and forth. They don’t notice the switching because their brain sort of papers it over to give a seamless experience of consciousness, but what they’re actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment-to-moment, task-to-task—[and] that comes with a cost.” When you switch from task to task you have to remember what you were doing before, and you have to remember what you thought about it. Miller says that when this happens, the evidence shows that your performance drops. You’re slower. And this is called the “switch-cost effect.”¹

To avoid the switch-cost effect, Newport advocates turning off your notifications while reading or working on a project—and doing one thing at a time.

Old fashioned?

Sure—but also, according to him and to the neuroscientists, more efficient and more productive.

So what does that have to do with parenting?

Well, I would be remiss if I advised you to try to get your children to permanently turn off their notifications or if I suggested that you could actually get them to stop looking at their phones all the time. They won’t listen, they will argue, they will get angry—and we all know this.

But—there are a couple of things you can do.

First, you can start to adopt some of these habits yourself. And then you can talk about having done so in front of your children. You can talk about whether or not this has helped you.

There are numerous benefits to you here—you may actually find that you are more productive, and you may find that you feel less anxious. Constantly trying to pay attention to several sources of communication and information all day long is stressful and anxiety-provoking.

Second, while your children are young, you can insist that they put their cell phones and iwatches (if they have them) in a basket while they do homework and at family meal times—and you can do so yourself. Imposing this rule provides a model for how to handle the temptations of social media and phone notifications—and it can help your children to eventually internalize some self-discipline around their phone use and media habits. You can probably get away with this through junior high—or, if you are really good, through high school. It will be hard, but if you persist, your children might just go off to college with some good work habits that are more productive and less stressful for them than if you hadn't made these rules.

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Third, you can stand up against the forces that threaten to ruin our attention and say "No." Johan Hari, author of Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again, looked behind the scenes of social media platforms and other businesses and found that they have strategized to intentionally catch and fragment our attention for their profit. You can understand that your fragmented attention benefits them—but it definitely does not benefit you—and it certainly does not benefit your children.