Attention is a limited resource

Attention is the small amount of what is happening that you can actually work with. The rest of the world carries on anyway. That limit is biology, not laziness, and it is smaller than people are polite enough to admit.

Parents and young adults are asked to hold several lives at once: a child, a job, a phone, a body that needs food. The mind will try. It will also drop things, snap, and forget the thing you walked into the room for. That is the budget running out, not a verdict on you.

Moving from the stove to a message to a child's question is not free. Each switch throws away a bit of what you were holding, then charges you to rebuild it. A morning of fifty small switches can feel like a day of work with nothing finished.

Phones are unusually good at forcing switches. A notification is someone else spending your budget. You can still use the device. You do not have to leave the tap on.

You cannot download more attention. You can stop wasting it on purpose.

This page is not a test for ADHD or anything else, and it will not tell you whether you have a condition. If attention has been a serious, lifelong problem in school, work, and home, that is a conversation with a doctor — or a GP in the UK — not a quiz in an app.