Almost everyone agrees they find it harder to concentrate than they did ten years ago. Where people differ is why. The popular answer is the phone — but it is such a convenient answer that it is worth being suspicious of it.

A closer explanation may be this: we have rearranged the structure of the day. An afternoon used to be a single block. Now it is cut into a dozen pieces by meetings, messages, notifications and small urgent tasks. No individual piece is long, but the switching between them has a cost.

The price of switching

Psychologists observe the same effect repeatedly: after moving from one task to another, people need time to return to their previous depth. That recovery period is consistently longer than they estimate.

The result is a peculiar state — a day spent entirely busy, with nothing you can recall completing. What was busy was the switching, not the work.

Concentration is less an ability than a condition that has to be protected.

More useful than deleting apps

Many people try the extreme version: delete the apps, silence notifications, lock the phone in a drawer. It works, but rarely for long, because it fights the symptom.

A plainer suggestion is to keep a stretch of the day deliberately empty — no meetings, no target, and not used to catch up on work either. Its purpose is not efficiency but giving attention a chance to gather again.

It sounds insufficiently forceful, even a little indulgent. But if attention really is being fragmented by structure, then the repair can only be structural too.