Concentration

Honestly, it depends enormously on the time of day. Before about eleven in the morning I can sit down and work for two hours without surfacing, but after lunch my attention frays and I catch myself rereading the same paragraph three times. My main trick is fairly low-tech: I put my phone in a drawer in another room and use a cheap kitchen timer set to twenty-five minutes, because the thing that breaks my concentration is never the work itself — it's the tiny decision to 'just check' something. As a child I was far worse; my teachers wrote 'easily distracted' on every single report card, so I don't think it's a fixed trait, it's more of a muscle you train. And yes, I do think it's harder now than it was for my parents' generation. They had boredom, which is uncomfortable but leaves your mind alone, whereas we have an endless supply of things that are more interesting than whatever we're supposed to be doing.