What pulls your attention?
Twelve short questions. At the end you get a breakdown across six things that interrupt work, each of which produces the same sentence — I cannot concentrate — and each of which wants a different response.
This does not tell you what kind of person you are, and there is no type at the end of it. It sorts the complaint into possible causes, because the advice for one of them is often the exact reverse of the advice for another. All six write-ups appear whatever you answer.
Before you begin
Answer for a normal recent week rather than your worst one or your best one. If a question describes something that only happens in one setting, that still counts — note the setting, because it will matter at the end.
Twelve questions
Question 1 of 12
Your breakdown
How often each one showed up
The six, strongest recognition first
What the setting can do, which is not your job to arrange alone
Four of the six above are produced mostly by conditions rather than by people. A room, a timetable and a set of interruption norms can make any of them much cheaper or much more expensive, and none of those three is your personal choice.
- Somewhere between silent and social. Most libraries and most offices offer a silent room and an open room and nothing in between. The gap is where a lot of people work best.
- An agreed shape for interruptions. A team or a household can decide that non-urgent questions are collected and asked once, rather than arriving one at a time. This costs the asker a few minutes and saves the person working a great deal more.
- Checkpoints that exist outside your head. A course with one deadline in twelve weeks is a design decision. Asking for an interim submission — even an ungraded one — is a reasonable request to put to a tutor or a manager.
- Tasks written as actions. When work is handed over as a heading rather than a first step, everyone receiving it pays the same definition cost privately. Asking for the first action to be named is a request about the handover, not about you.
Any of these is worth raising with a course rep, a librarian, a tutor, a manager or a flatmate. They are changes to conditions, and conditions are shared property.
What these numbers are, and what they are not
They are a count of how often you recognised a description. They are not a score, a threshold or a measure of anything, and a high number is not worse than a low one. Most people recognise several of the six, and the same person often shifts between them depending on the week, the room and the task.
The reason for splitting the complaint up at all is that the tools genuinely diverge. Changing something every twenty minutes helps attention that fades in uniform conditions and is expensive for attention that goes deep and does not want to move. Reducing noise and light helps someone taking in more than they can sort and can flatten someone who needed the input to stay awake. Choosing a tool by the complaint rather than by the cause is how people end up with the reverse of what they need.
Worth knowing: on the worry section, one influential study found that a ten-minute write about exam worries before an exam improved performance in students who were highly anxious about tests (Ramirez & Beilock, Science, 2011). Replication since has been mixed, so treat it as promising rather than settled. It is cheap to try and there is little to lose by testing it on yourself.
Nothing here is saved or sent anywhere. Your answers exist only while this page is open, and nothing about you is stored.
Written for Thought Club as general guidance, not medical advice. Free to read, print, and share.
More resources
All resources →Distraction log
Notice what actually interrupts you, so you can respond to the real cause.
Focus sprint
A short, timed run at one task — with a clear start, a clear stop, and a break.
More quizzes
Short, plain-language quizzes that sort a vague complaint into a useful next step.