The Atlantic Gift Article: “…And these days, we’re struggling. Gloria Mark is a psychologist at UC Irvine who studies what, exactly, workers in a knowledge economy do all day. Early in her career, she shadowed office workers with a stopwatch and logged all of their activity. Mark and her co-author found that the typical worker switched tasks about every three minutes, on average. For the title of the resulting paper, in 2004, she used a quote from one of her subjects: “Constant, Constant, Multi-tasking Craziness.” Over the next 20 years, Mark studied work activity at large organizations such as Microsoft using increasingly sophisticated tools, including cameras and programs that recorded computer activity. In 2012, she found, office workers were switching tasks every ­75 seconds. By 2022, it was about every ­45 seconds. Multitasking is the act of distracting yourself. It comes with a cost even when tasks feel related, because it requires you to switch the “mental rules of the game,” as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham puts it. Even when people are allowed to switch between tasks at their own discretion, the more they switch, the longer everything takes. As Mark has written: “We find that in ­real‑world work, the more switches in attention a person makes, the lower is their end‑­of‑day assessed productivity.”…