Tool 13 · Develop yourself
Not a screen time audit. An investigation into what your attention is evidence of, and what it is not.
A guided 20 to 30 minute conversation using ChatGPT. Free, no account, nothing to sign up to.
01
Copy
Take the TAIU prompt.
02
Paste
Open ChatGPT.
03
Talk
One question at a time.
Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.
You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.
Most people do not have an attention problem. They have an unresolved problem that is taking their attention.
Nothing needs changing is a legitimate result here, and it is more common than the internet suggests.
What you'll explore
A note from Mark
I have watched a lot of capable people conclude that they have an attention problem when what they actually have is too much to do.
The phone is the easiest thing to blame because it is visible and because everybody agrees. What I usually find underneath is something less convenient. An unresolved conversation. A decision somebody has been carrying for a year. A job they have privately stopped believing in. Those things take attention constantly and they do not appear anywhere in a screen time report.
The other thing worth saying is that plenty of attention is owed. If you are running a business, raising children or looking after a parent, your week is not going to look balanced, and being told to be more present is close to useless. That is not a priorities failure. It is arithmetic.
And I would defend the unproductive parts. The hour of football, the game, the long phone call, the walk with no purpose. People apologise to me for those and then describe them as the best part of their week.
So this exercise is looking for evidence, not efficiency. It is entirely capable of concluding that your attention is going roughly where it should, and if that is what your evidence says, I would take it and get on with your week.
What you'll get
01
Where your attention actually goes
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Why it goes there
03
What to protect
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What, if anything, to change
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Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
What now?
01 · Save it
What actually had your attention recently, from evidence rather than from your own summary.
02 · Test it
Watch three ordinary evenings and note what interrupts you and who sent it. Three evenings tell you more than a fortnight of good intentions.
Before you optimise anything
If the conclusion was that the pattern is temporary, the useful step is deciding when you will look at it again rather than trying to fix it now.
If it found something unresolved taking your attention, treat that as the piece of work. Attention returns on its own once the thing is settled.
What I would do
Start with what actually happened yesterday, not with a list of priorities. Priorities produce a polished answer and yesterday does not.
Separate three things before drawing any conclusion: attention you chose, attention your circumstances demand, and attention that arrived without a decision.
Treat what your mind returns to in the gaps as seriously as what your calendar contains. Unresolved things take more attention than most schedules show.
Ask whether the pattern belongs to this period or to the way your life is arranged. A hard six months is not evidence of a badly designed life.
Decide what deserves protecting before deciding what to remove.
Test it
Say out loud what you think you gave most of your attention to yesterday, then reconstruct the actual day hour by hour and compare the two.
Name the thing you would protect if your week were cut by a third. Then check whether it is currently in your week at all.
Give one activity you feel guilty about a week without guilt and see whether you still want it. Some of it will turn out to be rest and some will not.
The alternative
The obvious conclusion is that you are distracted and should be more disciplined. Sometimes that survives. Often it does not. This is not an attention problem, it is a workload problem, and no method fixes a week that contains too much. This is not distraction, it is worry, and it will keep taking the same hours until the thing it belongs to is dealt with. This is not poor priorities, it is a season of genuine responsibility that will end. This is not a bad habit, it is where your curiosity actually lives, and you have been calling it a waste because it does not pay. And occasionally the uncomfortable one: the thing you say you want to spend attention on is no longer something you want.
Think about this
Take this to Ask Mark
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →Finished the exercise?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
If most of it turned out to be demanded
Further thinking
Attention Span
Gloria Mark
A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind
Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert
Flow
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Book
Gloria Mark
Mark has measured what people actually do at a computer for twenty years, rather than what they report doing. The average uninterrupted stretch on one screen has fallen from around two and a half minutes to under fifty seconds, and roughly half of the interruptions are self generated. Her argument is that attention is shaped by design, rhythm and workload before it is shaped by willpower.
Article
Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert
Sampling thousands of people at random moments, the study found that minds wander around forty seven per cent of the time, and that people were less happy when their attention was elsewhere than on what they were doing, almost regardless of what that was. Where the mind goes when nothing demands it turns out to be worth looking at.
Book
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The original work behind absorbed attention: the conditions are a clear task, immediate feedback and difficulty roughly matched to skill. Useful here as a discriminator. Attention that absorbs you and attention that merely holds you feel similar in the moment and leave you in completely different states afterwards.
Book
Oliver Burkeman
The title comes from a simple observation. An average human life is surprisingly short when expressed in weeks. Burkeman challenges the idea that becoming more productive will eventually create enough time for everything. It won't.