How long can a person concentrate?

With a reported 8 seconds of concentration available to the human brain at any given time, it’s actually miraculous that we get anything done. This attention-span, roughly on par with that of a goldfish, was made notorious by a 2011 Time article. It cited a study seeming to indicate that since the onset of the digital age we had dropped about 4 seconds off of the average person’s ability to concentrate.

So how does an online reminder app help concentration?

Thankfully, concentration is only one of the many moving parts of productivity, and according to the Harvard Business Review, our ability to refocus our attention may be as crucial to the human condition as concentration. Due to such findings, an online reminder app that can help us weed out unnecessary distractions and refocus our concentration is actually a fairly novel concept that is gaining in popularity.

Since our brains clearly need downtime we are in an ongoing battle with mass-media and other strategic efforts to grab our attention. In addition, once our concentration has been broken it takes a reported 23 minutes to regain it!

Recently, NPR demonstrated that brain’s ability to truly multitask is a bit of an urban myth, what we can do well is oscillate between tasks. It’s this ability, along with ample prompting toward what we actually set out to do, that gives online reminder apps the potential to save us hours each day.