Lesson 1 looked at how often your attention moves. This lesson explores the states it moves between.

Most advice about attention presents a single ideal: deep focus throughout the day. Anything else is treated as a lapse or a failure to concentrate.

Research offers a more useful model. Attention can be understood using two dimensions: how engaged you are and how challenged you feel. Together, they create four states:

• Focused: you are highly engaged and highly challenged. You feel absorbed in an activity that stretches your abilities without completely overwhelming them.
• Routine: you are highly engaged but not strongly challenged. The activity is familiar, mechanical or repetitive, but it can still hold your attention.
• Bored: you are neither engaged nor challenged. You may move between websites, applications or other activities without staying long enough to become involved in any of them.
• Frustrated: you feel highly challenged but not engaged. The activity is difficult, but you cannot easily stop because of a deadline, an obligation or someone else’s expectations.

The most easily overlooked state is routine attention. This includes filing documents, formatting a presentation, organising your inbox or completing the mechanical part of a larger task.

These activities can absorb your attention without placing heavy demands on it. However, people often treat this time as wasted or see it as evidence that they are not disciplined enough to focus.

It is neither. Routine activity gives your attention a lower-demand state in which it can remain engaged. Unit 3 will show you how to use this state deliberately.

A day filled entirely with demanding focus is not necessarily a successful day. It may simply be a day in which your mental energy runs out earlier than you intended.

Frustration is the state to watch carefully. You are facing a difficult task, you are not engaged with it and you feel unable to stop.

This can produce an hour at your desk with little progress and a great deal of tiredness. It is not simply a failure to focus. It can be a sign that the task is too large, poorly timed or missing information or support you need. Unit 2 will help you reduce the conditions that create this state.

There is also a fifth concept. It is not another state, but a pattern of movement between states.

Researchers call it kinetic attention. It describes rapid shifts of attention between applications, social media, websites, computers and phones. It is the 47-second pattern from Lesson 1, experienced from the inside.