Attention patterns

You're mid-sentence and the thought disappears. You finish the sentence with something vague. The thought doesn't come back.

You've read the same paragraph four times. Each time you reach the end having retained nothing. You're not distracted — you're trying.

You opened a browser to do one specific thing. You now have eleven tabs open and the one thing still isn't done.

You do brilliant work on things that interest you and near-zero output on things that don't. The gap is large enough that people notice.

You put the object down in a logical place. Within minutes you can't find it. You've spent more time looking for things this week than most people do in a month.

The deadline has existed for weeks. The work starts in the final hours — not because you planned it that way, but because urgency is the only thing that activates it.

Switching from one task to another takes something out of you — even from something you dislike to something you want to do. The resistance doesn't make logical sense.

Someone interrupts you mid-task. When you come back the thread of what you were doing is gone and re-entry takes longer than the interruption.

Someone told you something important recently. You were present when they said it. You forgot. They took the forgetting personally.

You build a new organisational system. It works for ten days. Then it joins the previous systems you built and abandoned.