Pay attention!

I wonder how many of you will read this article or listen to my voice right through to the end? With our busy lifestyles and continuous distractions, it's hard to stay focussed on one task and I wouldn't be surprised if I lose you somewhere along the way – but we'll see!

Some experts believe that out attention spans are actually shrinking. We often joke that goldfish have the shortest level of concentration, so much so that they forget what they saw nine seconds earlier. Well now a study says that humans have an even shorter span – just eight seconds. This I can believe – there's always so much to do and so much to remember that my brain gets overloaded and I find it hard to zero in on one thing.

Of course, smartphones, the internet and social media all take up a lot of our attention. Chicago-based research firm Dscout found that we look at our mobile phones for, on average, 2.42 hours every day. It is tempting to keep glancing at our phones when we should be focussing on other things and it's something we didn't and couldn't do before the boom in digital media and smartphones, so maybe that's why the amount of time we can concentrate has been dropping. A report carried out for Microsoft said the average human attention span in 2000 was 12 seconds but has now fallen to just eight seconds.

However, a BBC radio programme called More or Less, couldn't find evidence to back up Microsoft's report. It spoke to Dr Gemma Briggs, a psychologist at the Open University, who says there are problems with the idea of measuring attention spans and it's all down to the individual person, "so attention-switching ability may well have developed in recent years, in the age of the smartphone and the internet.

But because someone's distracted by their smartphone… it doesn't mean that they then don't have the ability to control and sustain their attention when they carry out another task."

This suggests we're getting better at switching our attention quickly between different tasks; we can multi-skill better than before so we can achieve more things. This is useful in the modern workplace where we need to turn our hand to many different jobs.

But for people who want to grab our attention, such as advertisers, they have to think of clever ways to make us sit up and take notice of them. And there are still times when something demands our full attention, without any distractions, like reading or listening to this article. Did you make it to the end?!