Why Your Attention Keeps Slipping Away (And How to Get It Back)

9 am on Saturday. I’m sitting in a coffee shop, my laptop open, surrounded by customer chatter and the scattered debris of modern knowledge work. Three half-finished articles. Two consulting projects with deadlines looming. Emails multiply like rabbits. And somewhere in the back of my mind, there’s a nagging feeling that I should be exercising, calling my parents, and planning next week’s content calendar for Substack.

My interest is ping pong. The deadline that was manageable yesterday is now approaching. It seems like a client presentation that’s supposed to take an hour will take up your entire weekend. Even checking email felt like wading through a swamp.

Everything felt “urgent,” but there was nothing to accomplish. I couldn’t see it in that moment, but the scattered feeling stemmed more from the way I was directing my attention than a lack of willpower or time management. I used to think that naturally successful people had better focus. It turns out they know something about their brains that the rest of us often escape: It’s possible to direct your attention with the same intent you direct your muscles at the gym.

Today we are facing an attention crisis that previous generations never had to overcome. Social media notifications, Slack messages, email alerts, and endless scrolling of information have led to what researchers call “sustained partial attention.” We are always there, but we are never fully focused, we are always distracted.

Far from just being annoying, a lack of “full” attention can sabotage our most important goals and make everything seem unsatisfying or insurmountable. Each task feels more stressful because your attention is simultaneously tracking five other “urgent” priorities, all of which claim to be the most important. The result can be that all tasks are pushed to the periphery of your attention.

The focus of your view

Dr. Emily Balsetis, Social psychologist at New York University who studies visual perception and goal attainment, has spent years revealing how our attention shapes our reality. In our conversation, she shines as she explains how simple shifts of attention can change people’s lives.

She explains with an example: Think of your eyes as a flashlight. The center beam clearly shows color and detail, while the outer glow only captures movement. Balsetis explains this with a simple experiment: Ask someone to stand behind you holding a credit card, then bring it out of your peripheral vision and toward the center. You’ll be amazed at how close it is to the front before you can even tell what color it is.

“You can’t tell color with peripheral vision,” Balsetis says with a laugh. “Very good at motion detection, bad at detail, bad at color.”

However, seeing something clearly does not guarantee that you are actually paying attention to it.

“We’ve all experienced our eyes moving across the pages of books while our minds wander elsewhere,” says Balsetis. “Although our eyes pick up the words, we do not have the conscious awareness to know what we have just read.”

The same thing happens with goals. We fool ourselves into believing that devoting time to a task means we’re focused on it, even though a large portion of our attention is scattered elsewhere. By the end of the day, you’ve been “busy” for eight hours but haven’t made any tangible progress on the things that matter most. You may feel tired rather than energized.

This insight—that attention determines what we actually process—reveals why traditional approaches to goal setting fail. We know what we want to achieve, but we often ignore the mechanisms of interest that enable us to achieve it.

Train your attention

Don’t think of attention as a single muscle, but rather as a complex system with specialized components that can be trained independently. Just as your body has leg muscles for running and arm muscles for lifting, your attention has different muscles for different mental tasks.

When we break down what “attention” means, we’re really talking about several distinct processes: what you’re looking at + what you’re thinking about + how your brain integrates and assigns meaning to these signals = what gets your full attention.

Like any muscular system, attention responds to progressive training. The four methods below train different attention muscles that work together to achieve a goal.

Tool #1: Your Visual Focus Muscles

The first specialized component of your attention system is visual focus, which is your brain’s ability to narrow or broaden your attention span. When this muscle is strong, goals can seem closer and more achievable.

Discover Balcetis Narrowing visual attention—focusing intensely on a specific target rather than taking in the entire environment—makes people feel that target is literally closer than it actually is.

“Reducing the diameter of the spotlight so that we focus intensely on just a distant subject makes it experience it as if it were closer,” she explains, gesturing as if she were adjusting the camera lens. “It’s not just that we trick ourselves into thinking it’s closer to us. Rather, we visually experience it as closer to us.”

This can change behavior, not just perception. in Recent research On how visual focus affects exercise performance, Balsetis and her colleagues found that when runners and walkers focused their gaze on a single target in front of them, they tended to push harder and go further than when they let their attention wander across the broader environment.

How to strengthen this muscle: Your visual focus muscles become stronger when you practice narrowing your attention span. In practical terms, this means choosing a specific visual target that relates to your goal. If you are walking or running, focus intensely on a specific point in front of you. If you’re working toward a deadline or abstract goal, experiment Place a visual representation of the accomplishment in your line of sightsuch as a physical or digital “whiteboard” for your visual efforts in your office, and focus your attention on that reminder.

Once your visual focusing muscles can effectively narrow the scope of attention, the next challenge is to link this focused attention to meaningful future outcomes.

Tool #2: Your temporal dial muscle

The second specialization of attention in your brain is temporal connectivity, that is, your ability to link present actions to future outcomes. This muscle determines whether today’s sacrifices are worth making to gain tomorrow’s benefits, which can be difficult to measure accurately because we tend to struggle to connect our present selves to our future selves, especially our distant future selves.

Balcetis collaborated with UCLA researcher Hal Hirschfeld, who presented participants with digitally based old photos of themselves, showing what they would look like in 30 to 40 years. Then he asked: If you received $1,000 unexpectedly, how much would you save for retirement?

Spending a few minutes looking at a photo of their older selves has people saving twice as much for retirement. Suddenly my future self felt real, relevant, and worth sacrificing for.

How to strengthen this muscle: Your temporal connection muscle is strengthened when you practice clearly linking current actions to future results. For any goal that requires present sacrifice for future benefit, spend time in a specific daily life experience for your successful future self. Think about what your Tuesday morning will look like after achieving this goal. What do you do? how do you feel? What problems have disappeared from your life?

Tool #3: Your Obstacle Processing Muscles

With the temporomandibular connection muscles engaged, you might expect positive visualization to help. But most goal-setting advice fails to focus solely on training your visualization abilities without developing your obstacle-processing muscles—that is, your mind’s ability to plan challenges while staying motivated.

We’re told to visualize success, but research shows that purely positive visualization can actually discourage us. Gabrielle Oettingen of New York University measured people’s blood pressure (an indicator of psychological readiness to act) while they engaged in different types of visualization. Those who only imagined positive outcomes showed lower systolic blood pressure than those who visualized success and then thought about potential obstacles and backup plans.

“It’s vicarious satisfaction,” Balcetis explains, shaking her head at how counterintuitive this finding is. “It’s like, ‘Okay, I’ve already achieved this, so I can calm down.’”

The people who stayed active were those who combined positive visualization with planning for obstacles, imagining great outcomes and things that could go wrong, along with specific strategies for dealing with those challenges.

How to strengthen this muscle: Combine positive visualization and planning for obstacles. For any important goal, try this three-part visualization: Visualize the successful outcome in vivid detail, identify the most likely obstacles you’ll face, and create specific “if-then” plans for dealing with each obstacle.

This is preparation rather than pessimism. Obstacles will arise, and you will pivot rather than panic because you have already been trained to respond.

Tool #4: Your Cognitive Flexibility Muscles

The three attention muscles mentioned above work together, but can be strengthened by training a completely different cognitive system through seemingly unrelated activities. Just as cross-training builds strength that carries over to your main sport, training your cognitive flexibility muscles can make it easier for you to switch between different types of focused attention.

Balcetis met Giorgio Piccoli, CEO of American Flat, who has an unusual daily practice: He makes a list of 10 things. Not a to-do list, just 10 notes, ideas or connections. At a restaurant called Rosemary’s, he might list 10 ways they can leverage their name on their menu (starting with: “They don’t have a drink with rosemary in it. That’s ridiculous.”).

“Have these ideas become profitable?” Balcetis once asked him. “Almost never,” he replied. “But this habit is just a way I practice creative thinking and problem solving.”

How to strengthen this muscle: Your cognitive flexibility muscles grow when you practice sustained focus on activities that are unrelated to your main goals. Choose one activity that seems unproductive to train attention and practice it consistently. It could be juggling, drawing, doing crossword puzzles, or Piccoli’s “ten things” lists. The key is to choose something that requires focused attention but exercises different neural pathways than your primary work.

Just as runners practice yoga to improve their running skills, training unrelated attention skills makes achieving your main goals easier.

Attention as a trainable system

The difference between people who achieve their most important goals and those who remain stuck is often not talent, luck, or even chance. It’s mastering the invisible skill that makes everything else possible: intentional, directed attention. Amidst endless notifications, endless scrolling, and constant partial attention, this skill is more important than ever.

This Saturday morning taught me something I see again and again in my work with high-achievers: Smart people who can solve complex problems at work often feel powerless to direct their attention toward what matters most. The same scattered focus that trapped me in the coffee shop shows up in executives who don’t find time to think strategically, in consultants who dream of starting their own practices but never make progress, in leaders who know exactly what to prioritize but somehow never do.

But once you understand attention as a trainable muscular system rather than a fixed trait, things change. Now, your attention can be enhanced, directed, and optimized to achieve the results you want most. This transformation (I can improve my attention) means that the question is no longer about whether you have goals worth achieving. The better question is whether you are willing to train the skills that help achieve those goals Inevitable.