3 Reasons You Can’t Focus (Most People Only Fix One)

Transcript:

You’ve tried turning off notifications. Maybe you deleted an app or two, you put your phone face down, tried leaving it in another room entirely, and you still can’t get through two focused hours without your brain just finding somewhere else to be.

Well, I’m here to tell you that it does not have to be that way. There are three things that you need to watch out for to make sure that you don’t get caught in this cycle or, if you’re in it, get you out of it.

Hi, I’m Jenae from Productivity Stacks, and I’ve spent over a decade coaching freelancers and small business owners to work with your brain, not against it. And what’s happening here isn’t about willpower. You’re losing to a system problem, and the good news is that systems can be fixed.

When it comes to focus, most people spend their entire lives fixing one root cause. But today, we’re going to go through all three, and at each step, I’m going to give you something that you can actually do right now. By the end of this post, you’ll know exactly which villain has been stealing the most from you and what to do about it.

The Framework: Two Kinds of Triggers

To understand all three, we need to start with a framework from a book I genuinely think everybody should read, and it’s called Indistractable by Nir Eyal. His core idea is that every distraction comes from one of two types of triggers.

External triggers are the things in your environment that pull you away. A notification, an email ping, a message bubble on your screen. And then internal triggers are the ones coming from inside: boredom, stress, the urge to avoid something uncomfortable.

That distinction is genuinely clarifying, and external triggers are a real problem that costs real time. So let’s start there, and let’s put an actual number on it.

Villain One: External Triggers

Every time you get pulled away from a task, your brain has to disengage and then re-engage when you come back. Research on task interruption shows that there’s a real resumption lag: extra time that your brain needs just to get back to where it was before the interruption hit. And that lag grows with how complex or demanding the task was.

And here’s the part most people miss. Even seeing a notification and deciding not to look at it still pulls part of your attention away. Research suggests that receiving a notification disrupts performance on attention-demanding tasks, even when you don’t interact with it at all, with a magnitude that’s comparable to actively using your phone.

Crazy, right?

So here’s your action item, and I want you to actually do this. The formula is simple. Take your re-engagement time after a typical interruption and add the time you spent on the trigger itself. Multiply it by how many times it happens in a day, and that’s your hours lost number. Seriously. Run it now.

I didn’t run this calculation out of curiosity. I ran it because I had exactly four hours a day I could actually work. PTSD meant I’d hit a wall after that, and there was no pushing through it. Every minute I lost to a notification, a phantom vibration, a browser tab that I didn’t mean to open, that was a minute that I couldn’t get back. And when you’re working with that kind of constraint, you stop being abstract about distraction pretty fast.

Most people who run this are genuinely shocked by their number. One participant in my Time Vampire Cure workshop ran it and realized the work that he used to do in six or seven hours was now getting done in four once he fixed this. Not because he worked harder. Because he stopped leaking time that he didn’t know he was losing.

If you hate math as much as I do, don’t worry. The Time Vampire Cure workshop I have coming up includes a pre-built calculator that does this for you. But even a rough back-of-the-napkin version of this number is really eye-opening, and it’s going to be useful for the rest of this post, so do try it now.

Write your number down. We are coming back to it.

So the fix for external triggers is real and it works. Start by auditing your notifications. Turn off unnecessary ones completely, not just the sound, the notification itself, and create intentional systems for the ones you actually need so that you’re checking them on your schedule instead of theirs.

Here’s the thing, though. Even people who do all of this perfectly still can’t fully focus oftentimes, and that brings us to villain two.

Villain Two: Internal Triggers (Your Brain Starts Inventing Them)

Once you start turning off external triggers, something a little unsettling happens. Your brain starts inventing them.

There’s actually a name for this: phantom vibration syndrome. It’s been documented across so many studies that researchers have started tracking it systematically. And depending on the population, somewhere between one in five and nearly nine in ten people experience it. Researchers think this may happen because your brain is so used to being interrupted, it starts generating the interruptions itself.

You find yourself picking up your phone without actually deciding to, opening a browser tab you didn’t really mean to open, suddenly remembering that email from last Tuesday.

This is what Eyal calls internal triggers, and it’s rooted in how your brain builds loops. Trigger, action, reward. And the variable reward, not knowing whether the next scroll will bring something interesting, keeps that loop firing, even when you don’t consciously want it to. Eyal actually wrote an earlier book called Hooked that breaks down exactly how companies engineered this, and it is a fascinating and slightly terrifying read.

Here’s something worth sitting with, though. Before social media was the thing stealing our focus, it was TV. Before TV, it was actually novels that critics worried would distract people from productive work and weaken mental discipline. The platform keeps changing. The pull keeps happening, though, which tells us something important. The platform was never really the root of the problem.

Friction can be your best friend here. Logging out of apps, moving them off of your home screen, using app blockers. These things work because they give your brain just enough of a pause before the automatic behavior completes. I use them myself, and I absolutely recommend them.

Now, here’s your second action item. Think about the last few times you got pulled away from work by an internal trigger. Not a notification, but something that came from inside. Your brain wandering, suddenly needing to check something, finding yourself somewhere you just didn’t consciously decide to go.

Ask yourself, “What was I working on right before that happened, and how did I feel about that task?”

Bored by it? Overwhelmed by it? Avoiding something about it? Just sitting there, not really sure where to start?

Name the feeling that you noticed right before your brain wandered, and hold onto it. We’re going to use it in the next section, because that feeling is the actual villain, and it brings us to the one that almost nobody talks about.

Villain Three: The Discomfort Underneath

I’ve worked with enough people on this, and spent enough time inside my own brain, to know that when the external fixes aren’t fully working, there’s almost always something underneath, and it’s just not what most people expect.

What I’ve come to understand, and what aligns with research on procrastination as emotion regulation, is that internal triggers don’t come from nowhere. They come from discomfort. Your brain, when faced with something uncomfortable, will look for the fastest available exit. And in 2026, let’s face it, that exit is pretty much one tap away all the time.

The discomfort can look like a lot of different things:

• Overwhelm. The task feels too big, and you don’t really know where to start.
• Fear. Fear of failure, judgment, getting it wrong.
• Boredom. The task is genuinely tedious, and your brain just wants stimulation.
• Uncertainty. You’re not sure how to do it, or whether it’s even the right thing to prioritize right now.
• Perfectionism. Which is really just fear in a different outfit.
• Physical discomfort. Poor sleep, not eating well, an injury, untreated health issues.
• Poor systems. You’re mid-task and suddenly remember that you forgot to follow up with a client, and if you don’t do it right now, you’re going to forget because you have no system to capture it.
• Time revenge procrastination. That’s what I like to call your brain getting back at you for an overscheduled, under-rested day by simply refusing to cooperate.

One of my community members, who’s been with me since 2016, said it perfectly after going through this work. She said her internal triggers were the most important thing preventing her from moving forward, and that the process gave her tools to handle her overwhelm and fear.

And here’s what I love about that. She’d already done the work on external triggers years ago. She still needed this layer. This isn’t a beginner problem. It evolves with you. It changes.

So look at the feeling you identified a minute ago. Which of these does it match? Overwhelm, fear, boredom, uncertainty, perfectionism, physical, poor systems, or time revenge procrastination?

That’s your villain. Name it.

Not your phone, not your notifications. That specific discomfort is what’s been driving everything else. And this is what I mean when I say time management is really brain management. It has more to do with understanding what your brain is doing and why than it does with managing your minutes.

What You Have Now (And What Comes Next)

So now you’ve got three things: your hours number, a sense of where your automatic loops are showing up, and a name for the specific discomfort that’s been quietly running the show.

That’s more self-knowledge than most people get in a year of trying productivity hacks. But here’s what I know after 10 years of coaching this stuff. Knowing isn’t always enough. Some of us can have every freaking tool in the world and still not be able to activate. That’s not a you problem. That’s just how brains work, especially the kinds of brains that end up going deep on posts like this one.

So I’m hosting the Time Vampire Cure Workshop live, and we’re doing this together in a real peer setting with me coaching you through it. We’re going to figure out what your time vampire actually is, work through how to tackle it in a way that fits your brain, and build a system that you’re actually going to keep using.

It’s coming up live, and you can grab your spot here. And if you’re catching this after it has passed, no worries at all. Just subscribe to my newsletter, and I’ll let you know the moment the next one opens up.

The Three Reasons, One More Time

So there are three reasons that you can’t focus.

External triggers cost you more time than you realize, and now you have the formula to calculate exactly how much.

Internal triggers keep firing even after you fix the external ones, because the loop your brain built doesn’t just disappear.

And underneath both of those is a specific discomfort your brain has been running from, and it’s going to keep running until you name it and treat it at the source.

Most productivity advice stops at villain one. Some gets to villain two, but almost none of it asks, “What are you actually avoiding?” And that’s why most of it only works for a little while.

But now you know all three exist, and you’ve already taken the first step on each one today.

So I want to hear from you. Which villain did you recognize most in yourself? Was it the hours you didn’t know you were losing, the automatic loops, or did you find your discomfort when I listed them out? Drop it in the comments. I read every single one, and I’d genuinely love to know.

And I look forward to seeing you in the workshop.

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Sources

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3. Deb, A. (2015). Phantom vibration and phantom ringing among mobile phone users: A systematic review of literature. Asia-Pacific Psychiatry, 7(3), 231–239. https://doi.org/10.1111/appy.12164
4. Soroka, K., Samardakiewicz-Kirol, E., Szawłoga, T., Styk, W., & Samardakiewicz, M. (2024). Phantom phone signaling (PPS) and mental health — a review. Current Problems of Psychiatry, 25, 177–185. https://doi.org/10.12923/2353-8627/2024-0017
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7. Eyal, N. (2014). Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Portfolio.