Why your attention keeps slipping away (and how to get it back)

9 a.m. on Saturday. I’m sitting at the café, laptop open, surrounded by the chatter of customers, and the scattered debris of modern knowledge work. Three half-finished articles. Two consulting projects with looming deadlines. Emails multiplying like rabbits. And somewhere in the mental background, the nagging sense that I should be exercising, calling my parents, and planning next week’s content calendar for Substack.

My attention ping-ponged. The article deadline that felt manageable yesterday now loomed. The client presentation that should take an hour felt like it would consume my entire weekend. Even checking email felt like wading into a swamp.

Everything screamed “urgent,” but nothing felt achievable. I couldn’t see it in the moment, but the scattered feeling stemmed more from how I was directing my attention than a lack of willpower or time management. I used to think successful people innately had better focus. Turns out, they just knew something about their brains that too often escapes the rest of us: It’s possible to direct your attention with the same intentionality with which you direct your muscles at the gym.

We’re facing an attention crisis today that previous generations never had to navigate. Social media notifications, Slack messages, email alerts, and the endless scroll of information have created what researchers call “continuous partial attention.” We’re always on, but never fully focused, just perpetually scattered.

Beyond mere inconvenience, a lack of “full” attention can actively sabotage our most important goals and make everything feel unsatisfying or insurmountable. Each task appears more overwhelming because your attention simultaneously tracks five other “urgent” priorities, all claiming to be the most important. The result can be that all tasks get nudged into the periphery of your attention.

The focus of your gaze

Dr. Emily Balcetis, a social psychologist at NYU who studies visual perception and goal achievement, has spent years uncovering how our attention shapes our reality. In our conversation, she lights up as she explains how simple attention shifts can transform lives.

She illustrates with an example: Think of your eyes like a flashlight. The center beam shows color and detail clearly, while the outer glow only catches movement. Balcetis demonstrates this with a simple experiment: Have someone stand behind you with a credit card, then bring it around from your peripheral vision toward the center. You’ll be shocked at how close to the front it needs to come before you can even tell what color it is.

“You can’t tell color in peripheral vision,” Balcetis says with a laugh. “Super good at detecting motion, bad at details, bad at color.”

Still, seeing something clearly doesn’t guarantee you’re actually paying attention to it.

“We’ve all experienced our eyes moving across book pages while our mind wandered elsewhere,” Balcetis notes. “Even though our eyes capture the words, we don’t have the conscious recognition of knowing what we just read.”

The same thing happens with goals. We trick ourselves into thinking that throwing time at a task means we’re focusing on it, even though a crucial chunk of our attention is scattered elsewhere. By the end of the day, you’ve been “busy” for eight hours but made no meaningful progress on what matters most. You may feel exhausted instead of energized.

This insight — that attention determines what we actually process — reveals why traditional goal-setting approaches can fall short. We know what we want to achieve, but often overlook the attention mechanisms that enable us to achieve it.

Training your attention

Think of attention not as one muscle, but 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 it means to “pay attention,” we’re really talking about several distinct processes: what you’re looking at + what you’re thinking about + how your brain merges and assigns meaning to these signals = what gets your full attention.

Like any muscle system, attention responds to progressive training. The four methods below train different attention muscles that work together for goal achievement.

Tool #1: Your visual focus muscle

Your attention system’s first specialized component is visual focus — your brain’s ability to narrow or widen your attention spotlight. When this muscle is strong, goals can literally look closer and more achievable.

Balcetis discovered that narrowing visual attention — focusing intensely on a specific target rather than taking in the whole environment — makes people experience that target as literally closer than it actually is.

“Reducing that spotlight’s diameter so that we’re intensely focused on just a target up in the distance makes us experience it as closer,” she explains, gesturing as if adjusting a camera lens. “It’s not just that we’re tricking ourselves into thinking it’s closer. We are visually experiencing it as closer to us.”

This can change behavior, not just perception. In recent research on how visual focus affects exercise performance, Balcetis and her colleagues found that when runners and walkers fix their gaze on a single target ahead, they tend to push harder and go farther than when they let their attention wander across the wider environment. 

How this muscle strengthens: Your visual focus muscle gets stronger when you practice narrowing your attention spotlight. In practice, this means picking a specific visual target related to your goal. If you’re walking or running, focus intensely on a specific point ahead. If you’re working toward a deadline or an abstract goal, experiment with putting a visual representation of completion in your line of sight, like a physical or digital “whiteboard” of your efforts visible in your office, and narrow your attention to that reminder.

Once your visual focus muscle can narrow attention effectively, the next challenge is connecting that focused attention to meaningful future outcomes.

Tool #2: Your temporal connection muscle

Your brain’s second attentional specialization is temporal connection — your capacity to link present actions to future outcomes. This muscle determines whether today’s sacrifices feel worth making to receive tomorrow’s benefits, which can be difficult to weigh accurately because we tend to struggle to connect our present selves with our future selves, especially distant-future selves.

Balcetis collaborated with UCLA researcher Hal Hirschfield, who presented participants with digitally aged photos of themselves, illustrating what they might 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 made people save twice as much for retirement. The future self suddenly felt real, relevant, and worth sacrificing for.

How this muscle strengthens: Your temporal connection muscle strengthens when you practice vividly connecting present actions to future outcomes. For any goal requiring present sacrifice for future benefit, spend time experiencing the specific day-to-day life of your successful future self. Think about what Tuesday morning looks like after you’ve accomplished this goal. What do you do? How do you feel? What problems have disappeared from your life?

Tool #3: Your obstacle-processing muscle

With your temporal connection muscle engaged, you might expect positive visualization to help. But most goal-setting advice falls short by focusing solely on training your visualization abilities without developing your obstacle-processing muscle — your brain’s capacity to plan around challenges while maintaining motivation.

We’re told to visualize success, but research shows that pure positive visualization can actually demotivate us. Gabrielle Oettingen at NYU measured people’s blood pressure (a proxy for psychological readiness to act) while they engaged in different types of visualization. Those who only fantasized about positive outcomes showed lower systolic blood pressure than those who visualized success and then thought through potential obstacles and backup plans.

“It’s vicarious satisfaction,” Balcetis explains, shaking her head at how counterintuitive this finding is. “It feels like ‘Well, I’ve already achieved it, and so I can chill out.'”

The people who stayed energized were those who combined positive visualization with obstacle planning, imagining both the great outcome and the things that could go wrong, along with specific strategies for handling those challenges.

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

This prepares rather than pessimizes. Obstacles will arise, and you’ll pivot rather than panic because you’ve already rehearsed the response.

Tool #4: Your cognitive flexibility muscle

The three attention muscles mentioned above work together, but they can be strengthened by training a completely different cognitive system through seemingly unrelated activities. Just as physical cross-training builds strength that transfers to your main sport, training your cognitive flexibility muscle 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 observations, ideas, or connections. At a restaurant called Rosemary’s, he might list 10 ways they could leverage their name in their menu (starting with: “They don’t have a drink with rosemary in it. That’s ridiculous.”).

“Do these ever become lucrative ideas?” Balcetis once asked him. “Almost never,” he replied. “But that habit is just a way that I’m practicing creative thinking and problem solving.”

How this muscle strengthens: Your cognitive flexibility muscle grows when you practice sustained focus on activities unrelated to your main goals. Pick one seemingly unproductive attention-training activity and practice it consistently. It could be juggling, sketching, doing crosswords, or Piccoli’s “10 things” lists. The key is choosing something that requires focused attention but that exercises different neural pathways than your primary work.

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

Attention as a trainable system

The difference between people who achieve their most important goals and those who stay stuck often isn’t talent, luck, or even opportunity. It’s mastering the invisible skill that makes everything else possible: intentional, directed attention. Amid endless notifications, infinite scroll, and continuous partial attention, this skill is more critical than ever. 

That Saturday morning taught me something I see repeatedly in my work with high achievers: Brilliant people who can solve complex problems at work often feel powerless to direct their own attention toward what matters most. The same scattered focus that trapped me at the café shows up in executives who can’t find time for strategic thinking, in consultants who dream of starting their own practice but never make progress, in leaders who know exactly what they should prioritize but somehow never do. 

But once you understand attention as a trainable muscle system rather than a fixed trait, things change. Now, your attention can be strengthened, directed, and optimized for the outcomes you want most. That shift (I can improve my attention) means the question is no longer about whether you have goals worth achieving. The better question becomes whether you’re willing to train the skills that make achieving those goals inevitable.