Storytime
At some point, deep focus started to feel like a superpower rather than a baseline. You sit down to work on something that actually matters, and within minutes your hand is moving toward your phone, or a new tab has appeared, or your brain has drifted somewhere else entirely. It's frustrating. And increasingly, people interpret it as a sign that something's wrong with them.
It's not. But something has changed.
Gloria Mark and her colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, have been watching office workers since 2004. In the early studies people spent about three minutes on any one task before switching; her more recent measurements put the average stretch on a single screen at under a minute. Not because they're undisciplined, but because they've been trained to. Every notification, every red badge on an app icon, every ambient buzz is a cue designed to redirect attention. And attention, like any other cognitive resource, responds to repeated patterns. The more often it gets redirected, the more readily it expects redirection.
One downstream effect is a state where the brain keeps alternating between competing inputs without settling on any of them. That has a measurable cost. Laboratory studies of task-switching consistently find that people respond more slowly and make more errors in the moments after a switch, and that the cost grows when working memory is already loaded. It's easy to miss, because it doesn't feel like fatigue. It feels like an ordinary working day.
There's also a phenomenon called attention residue. When you switch from one task to another, a portion of your attention stays anchored to what you just left. You're physically doing the new thing, but mentally you're still partly somewhere else. Checking messages between deep work sessions doesn't just cost you the few minutes of reading, it costs you the recovery time needed to get properly back into the original task.
None of this means you're broken. It means you've been practising a particular kind of attention (fragmented, reactive, always-on), and your brain has become very good at it. The good news is that the same principle applies in the other direction.
Attention can be trained. Sustained focus is a skill, and skills respond to deliberate practice.
The mechanics are straightforward, even if the execution takes patience. Start with shorter blocks than you think you need, 20 or 25 minutes of genuine, single-task focus, and build from there. The first few sessions will likely feel uncomfortable. Your brain will look for an exit. That discomfort is the sensation of a mental muscle being worked. It passes.
Physical environment makes a bigger difference than most people expect. Keeping your phone in another room during focused work isn't about willpower, it's about removing cues. Out of sight, out of the habit loop. One much-cited experiment found that people whose silent phone sat face down on the desk scored lower on working-memory tests than people whose phone was in another room (Ward and colleagues, 2017). A 2022 attempt to repeat it found no difference, so treat the effect as plausible rather than settled. The practical advice costs nothing either way.
Deep reading is a reasonable place to practise. Not skimming, not scrolling through articles, actually sitting with a long-form text and following it through. It asks for exactly the kind of sustained attention that skimming doesn't, and that reactive media has been training out of you. Don't expect a timetable. Expect the first chapter to feel longer than it is.
Bitesized
- Fragmented attention is a trained response to years of reactive, notification-driven environments, not a personality flaw.
- The average person switches tasks every few minutes during a working day, and every switch carries a measurable cost in speed and errors.
- Attention residue means that switching between tasks carries a hidden cost: part of your focus stays on the previous task even after you've moved on.
- Sustained focus is a trainable skill: short, deliberate focus sessions build it over time, just like physical training builds endurance.
- Environmental design matters enormously: removing devices from your immediate environment is more effective than relying on willpower to ignore them.
- Deep, engaged reading asks for exactly the kind of sustained attention that skimming does not, which makes it a reasonable place to practise.