Experiments On Reclaiming Attention

Why you haven't regained your attention and what I'm building

Created using Midjourney

It’s 10 a.m. on Monday. I sit down at my table and open my laptop for work. While my Mac is booting up, my hands drift towards my phone, unbidden, which is sitting on my desk, arm’s length away. No notifications. Nothing waiting. I pick it up anyway. The Mac has booted by now, waiting for me to enter the password. But I’m already lost in my phone. By the time I enter my password, I’ve already checked my email, scrolled through Instagram, and refreshed the New York Times feed. My Mac sits there, waiting. I barely notice.

Then I put my phone down and set my gaze upon the browser that’s waiting for me. I see a flood of tabs on the notch to a point where I can only see the icons, not the titles. I start where I left off yesterday, checking Slack, opening my email, clicking on different documents, eventually settling into a shallow zone of scattered work, all without even taking a moment to reflect,

What is the one thing I really want to achieve today?

I spend the rest of the day with my attention scattered, moving in and out of focus like a broken street lamp, flickering on and off, unable to get itself to illuminate the pavement, to achieve the one task for which it was hired. By lunchtime, I’ve gone through multiple, exhaustive, and demoralizing cycles of attention loss, only to feel like I’ve spent a lot of energy. Yet I haven’t accomplished anything meaningful.

At the end of the day, after countless moments of distractions, futile notifications, and a lot of shallow work, I wrap up my workday. Only to hop on to YouTube, scroll through the recommendation feed, and spend the next 2-3 hours on autopilot, clicking through videos I don’t remember five minutes later. By the time I close my laptop past midnight, I feel numb, unsettled, and unsatisfied. I pick up my phone, head over to the bathroom for my evening ablutions, while skimming through different feeds. I hop on my bed, start a podcast on Spotify, and spend another 20 minutes disrupting my sleep cycle, eventually falling asleep to it.

This was me a few months ago.

If reading this feels uncomfortably close to home for you — If the aforementioned looked like your last Monday, you already know: you’ve lost your ability to pay attention.

Most of you reading this might already have realized that you’ve lost it. But here’s what we haven’t grasped — why you’re losing.

Why you’re losing

So you’ve made it this far. Let me ask you a question: Did your mind drift away while you were reading the previous section? Were your eyes moving across words while your brain was somewhere else entirely? Did you feel like, ah — this is kinda boring me?

If your attention drifted while reading a story about attention drift, you know this is alarming. I’m sure you’ve made several efforts to improve.

You’ve probably read countless productivity books. You’ve jumped on the dopamine detox. You installed app blockers, only to find yourself manually overriding them within days. You gathered the strength to suppress FOMO and uninstalled Instagram. Felt that brief, beautiful clarity for 48 hours. Then reinstalled it because you needed it for work, or to message that old friend.

Maybe you’ve even succeeded for a few days or even weeks. You felt it - that sense of reclaiming yourself, of being present.. Then something happened. Imperceptibly, almost against your will, the relapse took hold. The addictive apps, the destructive patterns, made it back into your life.

Here’s what you need to understand: You’re not failing because you’re weak or you’re not serious enough. You’re failing because you’re fighting a fundamental systems problem with tactics.

I can only speculate what tactics you’re using without actually knowing you. But, from my personal life, I’ve observed 3 main reasons why I kept losing.

Reason #1 — Willpower Isn’t Sustainable

You’ve probably heard advice like this before: David Goggins screaming at you to ‘stay hard.’ Online gurus telling you to toughen up, be more disciplined, stop being weak. Just willpower your way through it.

When we think of making a change, most of us default to willpower (without even knowing). This makes sense, right? You want to change a particular behavior, you take a moment and tell yourself that you’re not going to do it. You say to yourself, I won’t check Instagram anymore while working, and hope to be perfect from that moment on.

But this often marks the beginning of the end.

Let me show you exactly what happens when you try to use willpower.

Neuroscience reveals why using willpower is a flawed approach. In the famous “chocolate and radish” experiment by Roy Baumeister’s, he asked participants to enter a room smelling strongly of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. On the table were two plates: one with delicious looking cookies and the other with radishes. The participants were randomly split off to two groups:

• One group was asked to resist the cookies and eat radishes.

• The other was told to eat the cookies.

After 5 minutes, both groups were assigned an unsolvable puzzle. The researchers weren’t actually interested in whether they could solve it—they wanted to see how long they’d try before giving up.

The group that had to resist the cookies and eat the radishes gave up 50% faster than the second group.

Your self-control operates like a muscle that fatigues with use. Every decision to resist checking your phone depletes the same finite resource you need for the next decision. By the time you’ve resisted three times, your capacity for resistance drops dramatically. And you’re making dozens of these micro-resistance decisions every single day without even knowing.

This is why people fail to quit smoking even though they know it will kill them. This is why people fail to quit porn even though it makes them feel terrible afterward. This is why you check Instagram at 11 PM even though you promised yourself you wouldn’t. This is why you just can’t “Stay hard” like David Goggins might tell you to. It’s not a personal failure, and it’s not because you’re weak or lacking discipline. But because willpower is a depletable resource, and modern life demands an impossible amount of it.

Reason #2 — The cookie-cutter problem

Let’s say you find something that seemingly works. Some productivity guru’s morning routine. A specific app configuration that someone swears changed their life.

There’s still a problem. It’s not designed for you.

Think about the last time you tried using someone else’s productivity system. You followed the steps. Set everything up perfectly. You felt the excitement at the beginning. But within days or weeks, you start to feel the friction. The system that seemed effortless in that explainer video felt clunky in your hands. You chalked it up to discipline, or lack thereof.

It’s similar to buying a fitness program off the shelf and expecting to see exceptional results. It could work, certainly for some people. But, for most, it won’t. The reason is quite simple. You have different goals, and your starting points – body fat ratio, weightlifting experience, response to stimulus, taste and preferences in workouts, and intensity - are entirely different. These factors are vital. They end up deciding if you’re going to stick to the program until completion, before you can determine if it worked for you.

The same applies when you’re trying to improve your attention.

The solutions need to account for your specific triggers, your environment, your constraints, your psychology, your previous failures, your relationships, your job, your life—to have any shot at success. And this requires a lot of work.

Here’s the cruel irony: fixing your attention problem requires a lot of attention.

You need to diagnose your triggers. Track your patterns. Understand what makes you reach for your phone or open that new tab. This self-evaluation takes time and focus—the very things you’re trying to reclaim. So instead, you reach for cookie-cutter solutions that promise results without the messy work.

But this is precisely why they fail.

Cookie-cutter solutions are static. These systems are missing a critical feature: A feedback loop that learns from your specific failures, adapts when progress stalls, and adjusts the strategy to fit the reality of who you actually are, not who the system assumes you to be.

Imagine a personal trainer who gives you the same workout every session. Someone who never tracks your progress or accounts for your injuries. Never ask, “Is my client enjoying the sessions?” and ignore tweaking when progress stalls. You’d fire that trainer immediately.

This is what generic solutions are—a static plan that can’t see you, can’t learn from your failures, and can’t improve based on your reality.

I’m not branding every idea, system, or piece of advice on productivity as a cookie-cutter and demonizing them. Some of the advice and systems out there are great. But the reality is, you need to constantly experiment; it requires a lot of deep work for it to truly make change happen in your life.

This is why even seemingly good solutions fail. Not because it’s wrong—but because it wasn’t built for you, and it can’t adapt to you.

And this brings me to the 3rd issue.

Reason #3 — The Isolation Problem

Perhaps the most overlooked reason why you’re stuck: You’re doing this all alone.

Think about the athletes you admire the most. Cristiano Ronaldo, Serena Williams, Tiger Woods, perhaps Mike Tyson? You might look up to them, see their success, and think that they’ve reached this elite level through pure dedication and perseverance. You’ve seen the highlight reels of them spending countless hours alone in gyms and on courts. But here’s what the spotlight rarely shows: the precise little tweaks, the timely push, the subtle adjustments made by their coaches and mentors.

Elite athletes don’t get to their level alone. They have multiple dedicated support staff, sports scientists, coaches, personal mentors, and support networks.

Take the example of Cristiano Ronaldo. Arguably one of the greatest footballers and the most recognized football player in the world. Ronaldo arrived in Manchester at the age of 18, a “show pony” as noted by Rio Ferdinand. He was an exciting talent with huge potential and even bigger flaws, nowhere near the polished, herculean athlete he is today. His first season was fairly average, with 6 goals scored in 40 games. He was a showman who’d hold the ball too long, try to beat multiple defenders, and do everything alone, instead of playing the team game.

His transformation came through years of small, precisely-timed interventions by his coach and mentor, Alex Ferguson.

Ferguson gave him the iconic #7 shirt instead of the #28, which he wanted to raise his expectations of himself. When Ronaldo became “public enemy number one” in England after the notorious red card incident involving his Manchester United teammate Wayne Rooney during the 2006 World Cup. Ferguson traveled to Portugal to stop Ronaldo from leaving Man United, minimized the controversy, and created a safe environment for him.

In 2007, Ferguson brought in technical coach Rene Meulensteen, who worked with Ronaldo on zone finishing drills and mindset shifts about scoring “effective goals” rather than “perfect goals”, leading to an exceptional 2007-08 season that confirmed Ronaldo as the world’s best player. He scored 42 goals in 49 games—the first player to score 30+ goals in a Premier League season at the time (31 league goals).

Another example is Serena Williams. At the age of 30, after not having won a Grand Slam in nearly two years, and a devastating loss to 111th-ranked Virginie Razzano at Roland Garros. She replaced her long-time coach and dad, Richard Williams, with Patrick Mouratoglou. Mouratoglou proved to be a transformative force. He refined her serve timing and added comprehensive pre-match briefings before matches, going over the opponents’ strengths, weaknesses, patterns, serving tendencies, and big-point behaviors. The results were immediate and historic. After employing Mouratoglou, Serena won 19 straight matches, capturing Wimbledon 2012, the London Olympics singles and doubles gold, and the US Open.

These are just a couple of my favourite examples. There are hundreds more. This isn’t unique to world-class athletes. Think about anything you’ve ever gotten good at.

You didn’t learn math all by yourself — you had a teacher. You didn’t know the perfect layup all by yourself — your PE teacher taught you. You undoubtedly spend countless hours alone, working on math problems or perfecting the layup, sharpening yourself day by day, but you didn’t go through the journey alone.

And, this is evident in data as well:

Research published in Obesity found that individuals in group-based programs lost 50% more weight than those attempting to do so alone, and were three times more likely to maintain their weight loss a year on.

A study by the Society of Behavioral Medicine found that individuals with workout partners exercised twice as frequently and were 95% more likely to complete their programs.

This is also evident in learning and academic settings. Cohort-based courses have completion rates up to 10 times higher than solo online learning. This is why edTech companies like Coursera and Udemy have a median completion rate of around 12.6%.

The patterns are well-established at this point. Yet somehow, when it comes to improving attention — arguably one of the most valuable and embattled resources in modern life, we’re expected to do this alone.

Here’s what isolation does: It makes you think the problem is you. That, everyone else has it figured out. That you’re uniquely weak or broken or undisciplined. You go down the cycle of thinking — if I just tried harder, wanted it more, or had more willpower, I could fix it. It makes you give up hope.

What is theAttention.company?

Solving the attention crisis is one of the most critical issues of our time. Here’s a stat you might not know: the average person spends over 6 years of their life on screens. Not creating, not connecting deeply, but caught in cycles of distraction engineered to keep them there.

Here’s the frustrating part: despite dozens of tools —app blockers, habit trackers, focus timers —there is no integrated solution. Nothing that brings together personalization, community, and adaptive systems into one coherent infrastructure.

I explored many solutions and spoke with others experiencing the same struggles. Everyone had the same experience: a scattered toolkit that required constant willpower to maintain.

And this very frustration is why I started theAttention.company.

You can think of theAttention.company as an experimentation company.

I’ve always loved productivity tools: Notion for knowledge, Slack for communication, Figma for design, Fabric for capturing ideas, and Linear for shipping products. These tools have redefined how we work and collaborate.

But these tools were built for the B2B world, with organizational productivity in mind. Not for the individual consumer. They’re not purpose-built to improve the quality of our daily existence, to help us overcome the addictions and patterns that fragment our attention.

This is what we’re building.

We’re not building another productivity app or another self-help course. We’re building infrastructure for regaining attention.

With the advancements in technology, AI in particular, there’s finally an opportunity to build an integrated solution. Tools that can truly be personalized for you. Systems that can learn your patterns, adapt to your failures, and adjust in real-time. Infrastructure that doesn’t just block apps—it helps you build a life where you don’t need to.

We’re running small-scale experiments and interventions targeting two of the most pressing. and widely ignored issues of our time:

1. Focus

2. Digital addiction

We’re throwing the entire kitchen sink at this problem. Some experiments will fail. Some might work. We don’t have all the answers yet. But we’re committed to figuring this out.

What’s next?

If what you’ve read today resonated, if you recognized yourself in that Monday morning story, if you’ve felt the exhaustion of trying and failing — I’m asking you to be part of this. You can join us in building the foundational infrastructure to solve this issue.

How can you help? Start by subscribing to this newsletter. Here’s what that means:

• Get early access to experiments we’re running

• Help shape what we build through surveys and feedback

• Join a community tackling the same struggle

• See the messy, honest process of building solutions that actually work

If you have any questions, ideas, or just want to talk. You can find me at: ash@theattention.company.