How to Increase Your Attention Span in a Job Built on Interruptions

You open a document to write one paragraph. Four minutes later you are reading an email you did not need to read, with two new tabs open and the paragraph unwritten. If that sounds like most of your working day, you are in good company, and the problem is fixable. Learning how to increase attention span is mostly a matter of changing the conditions you work in, then training a little, the way you would rebuild fitness after a long break.

In short: cut the number of times you switch, keep your phone out of reach, work in short protected blocks that you lengthen over time, sleep enough, and practise sustained attention on purpose, through long reading or one task with no exits. Give it two weeks before you judge the results.

What Has Happened to Attention at Work

Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, has measured how long office workers stay on one screen before switching for about two decades. In a 2024 interview with UC News, she described the change. In 2004, attention on a single screen averaged two and a half minutes. By 2020, it was 47 seconds.

Two other findings from her work matter more for fixing it. First, about half of those switches are self-interruptions. Nobody called. We simply went to check something. Second, getting back into a task after an interruption can take close to half an hour. That means a day with twenty small breaks can contain almost no real concentration, even if you sat at your desk the whole time.

If half the interruptions come from you, half of them are under your control.

Why Switching Costs So Much

In 2009, Sophie Leroy, then at the University of Washington, published a study on what she called attention residue. When people moved from one task to another before finishing the first, part of their attention stayed behind on the unfinished task, and they performed worse on the next one.

That explains a feeling most professionals know. You check a message for ten seconds, go back to your report, and spend the next few minutes still thinking about the message. The check took ten seconds and cost several minutes. Each switch leaves a little attention behind, and across a day those pieces add up to a scattered, tired mind.

So the goal is not superhuman focus. It is fewer switches, and a quicker way back when one happens.

How to Increase Attention Span: Nine Habits That Work

These are ordered by how much difference they make for the least effort. Start with the first three.

1. Put the phone in another room. Silent is not enough. Turned over is not enough. A phone within reach is a standing invitation to self-interrupt, and every glance is a switch. For a protected block of work, it goes somewhere you would have to stand up to get it.

2. Check messages at set times. Pick three or four times a day to deal with email and chat, and close them in between. Most messages can wait an hour. If you feel you must answer everything immediately or people will think less of you, that instinct is worth examining. We wrote about it in how to stop being a people pleaser.

3. Work in short blocks, then stretch them. If your attention currently breaks after a few minutes, a two-hour block will fail. Start with 20 minutes on one task with nothing else open. When that feels easy for a week, go to 30, then 45. This is the core of how to increase attention span: treat it as a capacity you build gradually.

4. Write the next step before you stop. When a block ends or something interrupts you, take ten seconds to write down exactly what you were about to do. Coming back to a written next step takes a fraction of the time it takes to reconstruct where you were. It also reduces the residue, because the unfinished task is parked rather than left hanging.

5. Keep one window open. Close every tab and app the current task does not need. Turn off pop-up notifications on your computer, including the helpful ones. Even writing assistants that flag errors while you type pull attention away from the sentence you are building. Turn them on for the edit, off for the first draft. For most people the free version of Grammarly handles that final check well enough.

6. Sleep. Sustained attention is one of the first things to go when you are short on sleep, and no habit on this list compensates for a week of five-hour nights. If your schedule has drifted, start with how to fix your sleep schedule before anything else.

7. Practise on purpose. Attention improves with use. Read a long book for 30 minutes with the phone elsewhere. Listen to a full album or a long conversation without doing anything else. These feel unproductive. They train the ability to stay with one thing. If reading is where you want to start, see how to read more books when you run a business.

8. Take breaks before you are spent. Mark’s advice is to notice when you start to tire and rest then, not after you have been staring at the same line for ten minutes. A short walk or a few minutes away from any screen works better than switching to social media, which is another task rather than a rest.

9. Count your self-interruptions. For two days, keep a tally every time you leave a task without a reason. The tally tends to shrink on its own, because noticing an urge to switch is often enough to let it pass.

Why Attention Is Worth Protecting

For anyone whose work is thinking, attention is the raw material. The proposal that wins the client, the analysis that changes a decision, the piece of work you can point to when you ask for a raise: all of it comes out of long stretches of uninterrupted focus. Consultants and freelancers feel this most directly. If you bill by the hour, scattered hours are the same price to the client and worth less, which quietly undermines the rate you charge.

There is also a wellbeing side. A day of constant switching is tiring in a way that a day of hard but focused work is not. Many people who describe themselves as burned out are, at least partly, worn down by fragmentation. Our guide to managing stress at work covers that link in more detail.

What Does Not Work

Brain-training apps. Games improve your score on the game. The evidence that they improve attention at work is weak, and in 2016 the US Federal Trade Commission fined the maker of one popular app $2 million over claims it could not support.

Multitasking as a skill. Some people believe they are good at doing several things at once. What they are good at is switching quickly, and the residue still builds up.

Willpower alone. Deciding to concentrate harder, in the same environment, with the phone on the desk and the inbox open, rarely lasts past the first afternoon. Change the setting first. Then rely on effort for what is left.

Doing it all at once. Adopting all nine habits on a Monday usually means none of them survive Friday. Pick two.

A Two-Week Plan to Start

Week one: phone out of the room for one 20-minute block each morning, and messages checked at four fixed times. Keep the self-interruption tally on day one and day seven and compare.

Week two: extend the morning block to 30 minutes, add a second block after lunch, and start writing the next step whenever you stop. Add 20 minutes of reading in the evening.

At the end of two weeks, compare your tally with day one. If the habits are working, the tally will be lower and the blocks will feel less like a fight. From there, keep stretching the blocks. Our guide to how to stay focused at work picks up from this point.

When It Is More Than Habit

If attention problems have been with you since childhood, affect every part of life rather than just work, or have not improved after weeks of genuine effort, talk to a doctor. Conditions such as ADHD, depression, anxiety and some sleep disorders affect attention, and they respond to proper treatment in a way they do not respond to productivity tips.

Questions Readers Ask

How long does it take to increase your attention span? Give it two weeks after removing the main distractions before you judge. Building up to long blocks of focus, an hour or more, takes a couple of months of steady practice.

Can you increase attention span at any age? Yes. Most of the change comes from your environment and habits, and those can be changed at any age.

What is the fastest way to improve focus today? Put your phone in another room, close everything except the one task, and set a timer for 20 minutes. It sounds too simple. Try it once before deciding.

Attention Is Built, Then Protected

The workplace has made sustained attention rare, which is exactly what makes it valuable. Knowing how to increase attention span comes down to two moves: remove the switches you can control, then train the capacity a little at a time.