What does the way I spend my attention say about the life I am living?

A guided 20 to 30 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. Not a screen time audit. An investigation into what your attention is evidence of, and what it is not.

A young man standing on a crowded city bus at rush hour, headphones round his neck and a phone held face down, glancing at something outside the frame while a friend talks behind him

Where your attention goes is evidence. It is not a verdict.

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 look at

01Yesterday, from waking up to going to sleep
02What kept pulling you back when you were meant to be doing something else
03Something you say matters that got very little of your attention
04Where a spare twenty minutes tends to disappear

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.

Read my full view ↓

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

This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.

01
Where your attention actually goes
02
Why it goes there
03
What to protect
04
What, if anything, to change
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.

See everything included ↓

01What actually has your attention
02What you said matters
03Where those agree
04Where they do not
05What looks deliberate
06What looks demanded
07What looks captured
08What keeps reopening
09The leading explanation
10The alternative
11Temporary, structural or imagined
12What to protect
13What, if anything, should change
14What remains uncertain
15What to do next

When you finish

Bring it back to your tree.

Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.

This session works on the whole of you, not one part of your life. Nothing is scored. At the end, you are asked once which part of your life this touched most. You can answer none.

The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.

Session
Date
The part of life this belongs to
What we found
The alternative we tested
What deserves protecting
What should change, if anything
Next actions
What to notice or find out
What remains unresolved

Open My Tree

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.

See more ↓

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

01
Start with what actually happened yesterday, not with a list of priorities. Priorities produce a polished answer and yesterday does not.
02
Separate three things before drawing any conclusion: attention you chose, attention your circumstances demand and attention that arrived without a decision.
03
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.
04
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.
05
Decide what deserves protecting before deciding what to remove.

Test it

01
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.
02
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.
03
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

Yesterday, in ordinary detail, rather than a description of your typical week.
What you kept returning to when you were supposed to be doing something else.
What is still in your head an hour after you stopped doing it.
Something you describe as important that received almost none of your attention.
The part of the week you would defend if somebody tried to take it.

Take this to Ask Mark

You have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.

This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.

Take this to Ask Mark →

Want to go further?

TRY · 10 MIN

Digital Reality Check

TAIU

Assumed screen behaviour and recorded screen behaviour are usually different.

Try it →

Was this useful?

READ · BOOK

Attention Span

Gloria Mark

Read this before you buy another app to fix your concentration. The evidence points at the environment you are working inside, not at your character.

Flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Best for working out which of your attention actually returns something.

Recommended by the TAIU community

What helped you?

If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.

We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.

Finished the exercise?

What did this uncover?

Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.

Two people at a workshop bench at closing time, one leaning in while the other puts a mistake right themselves

Next tool

What am I responsible for?

If most of it turned out to be demanded

Continue →What does not need fixing? →

Further thinking

Attention Span
Gloria Mark
A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind
Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert
Flow
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

See the thinking ↓

Book

Attention Span

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

A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind

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

Flow

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

Four Thousand Weeks

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.