Gloria Mark is a Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at University of California Irvine. This is a replay of our conversation in 2017 in honour of her having just published her book called ‘Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity’ which is being touted as the ‘must-read book for January’ and receiving a lot of enthusiastic media and podcast attention.

In this conversation from 2017, you’ll hear Gloria talk about her experiences as chair of a major conference, how she moved from a Fine Arts background, painting murals on buildings, to a PhD in cognitive science and to studying the relationship between media use, attention and stress. I’m re-playing this as I think it will be interesting to see how this work put her on the path to her current book and inspire people to similarly think about how they can amplify the impact of their academic outputs.

Full transcript to download

Overview:

0:05 Introduction to this episode.

5:31 How Gloria has grown in(to) the role of conference chair.

12:33 How the alternative of painting in a studio (when murals would be no option any more) was not a good fit.

13:41 From Arts to Biostatistics to Psychology: about being open-minded and taking risks.

26:03 About the patterns that can be seen in studying us multitaskers.

31:53 How digital media intensifies our multitasking and shifts attention.

36:08 Rewards and gratifications that people get with email, and how this makes breaking bad habits hard.

39:25 The importance of having a macro-level strategy.

43:11 How Gloria looks after herself and tries to alleviate stress.

53:29 End

Related links

Gloria Mark - home page

Book: Gloria Mark, 2023,  “Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity”