Distraction is a measurement, not a failure

Distraction is a measurement

You sit down to read. A while later you’re thinking about dinner, a message or something someone said last week. You didn’t decide to go. At some point you notice you’ve gone.

That moment of noticing is the useful part. This technique asks you to mark it calmly each time and to treat each mark as a measurement rather than a mistake.

What the research found

In a 2010 study, Killingsworth and Gilbert used a phone app to check in with 2,250 adults at random moments. In 46.9% of those moments, people were thinking about something other than what they were doing. They were volunteers with iPhones, not everyone, but drifting was common.

A 2006 review by Smallwood and Schooler describes what happens: attention moves off the task, and performance on it slips. It often happens without meaning to. A 2011 review by Schooler and colleagues adds that people are only now and then aware their mind is wandering. Noticing is a separate step, so it always comes after the drift has begun.

A 2012 study by Hasenkamp and colleagues treated noticing as something to record. In a brain scanner, 14 meditators focused on their breath and pressed a button each time they realised their mind had wandered. The authors described a cycle: the mind wanders, you notice, you come back and you stay for a while. In that picture, noticing is part of paying attention, not proof you failed at it. It’s a small study of meditators, not students.

Does it apply to ADHD?

In a 2015 study, Seli and colleagues asked large groups of adults, most without a diagnosis, about ADHD symptoms and everyday mind wandering. More symptoms went with more mind wandering that happens without meaning to, but not with daydreaming on purpose.

A 2017 study by Franklin and colleagues tested adults from the community in a lab and checked in with them during daily life. More ADHD symptoms went with more of the mind wandering that gets in the way, and weaker noticing explained part of that link. The authors suggest practising noticing might help, though they didn’t test that.

Keeping track has been tested too. A 2005 meta-analysis by Reid, Trout and Schartz pooled studies of children with ADHD who were taught to monitor their own behaviour, sometimes with rewards. Time on task improved a lot. These were children, in programs with more than a button, so it’s encouraging, not proof.

Why no blame

With ADHD there may simply be more to notice. If every slip feels like a failure, it’s tempting to stop marking them. Then the record shows someone who never drifts, which helps nobody. Marked honestly, a few weeks of runs show how long your focus usually lasts on each kind of work. That’s a number you can plan with. If your reading runs tend to end around 15 minutes, a 15-minute run you finish is a better start than a 30-minute one you don’t.

Try this week

Keep a sticky note beside you while you work. Each time you notice you’ve drifted, write one or two words about what pulled you away: ‘phone’, ‘hungry’, ‘worry about Friday’. No reasons and no judgement. Then go back to where you were. At the end of the week, read the list once. If one word keeps coming back, try one small change next week. If it’s ‘phone’, put it in another room for one run. If the note only gets used one day, that’s still a start.

Mark the moment

1. Pick a length you can usually finish. Not sure? Try 25 minutes.
2. Press Start focus (or Space).
3. When you notice your attention has gone, press I got distracted (or D). The stretch is logged as a run and the clock stops. Nothing counts until you press Start focus again, so there’s no rush to come back.

A distraction gets a soft tick, never a buzzer. Because noticing comes late, a run includes the drift before you caught it. That’s fine: as noticing gets quicker, your runs get more accurate.

In the Full layout, Today shows Avg run, Longest and Resets (the runs you ended with I got distracted). A day with lots of resets isn’t a bad day. It’s a day you noticed a lot. On the chart, each bar’s height is that day’s average run. Click a bar to see each run and how it ended. Signed in, Topics shows your average run for each subject, so you can see which work holds your attention longest.

A stray thought you catch early doesn’t have to end the run. With the to-do list on, Park a thought for later saves it to Tasks while the clock keeps going.

Signed in, if three short runs in a row end in a distraction, the timer offers a shorter length. It says the target is wrong for today, not you. Started a run by accident? Runs under 5 minutes can be removed from that day’s list.

There’s no standard attention span

You may have heard that attention lasts 10 minutes, or even 8 seconds. A 2016 paper by Bradbury looked at the claim that students lose focus 10 to 15 minutes into a lecture and found the evidence doesn’t support it. Attention seemed to depend more on the teacher than on the format. There’s no standard number to hold yourself to. Your own runs are a better guide.