Putting your phone away removes one distraction, not the leaks that keep pulling you back. The handset can sit in another room while chat stays open on your laptop, an investor’s objection replays in your head, and a pricing decision waits for your approval. The forecast you meant to finish stays open too.
To choose the right repair, trace the demand behind each return. An alert needs a boundary. An unfinished decision needs a next step. A team that cannot act without you needs a different agreement.
Why can’t I focus at work even when my phone is away?
Because the phone is one input among several, and removing an input does not settle the demands behind it. Your laptop still carries chat, email and dashboards. Worry continues without a notification. An unresolved commitment keeps returning. A team can still need answers during the hour you marked as focus time.
Chapter 5 of The Psychology of Founder Resilience groups attention leaks into three layers: external, internal and systemic. One line in the chapter describes the situation in this page’s question: “Fight only the external layer and you will wonder why focus never quite returns.” All three layers draw on the same attention budget. Read that budget as a planning picture, not a quantity you can measure: all three compete with the work you intended to do.
For this audit, a distraction is the immediate pull; an attention leak is the recurring demand behind it. A chat message can be the distraction. A rule that every routine exception needs the founder’s approval can be the leak. Mute the chat and the rule produces the next request.
That distinction is this page’s way of applying the book’s model, not a separate research classification. Use it to choose what to change, without assuming that three labels explain every difficulty with concentration.
Which layer keeps pulling you away?
Start with what happened, then ask what would bring it back.
| Layer from the book | What you notice | What to examine |
|---|---|---|
| External | Email, chat, notifications or repeated dashboard checks interrupt the task. | Which inputs can wait, and when will you review them? |
| Internal | Rumination, worry or an open loop pulls you away without an alert. | What needs capturing, deciding or a scheduled return? |
| Systemic | Immediate replies are expected, or work waits for your intervention. | Who can decide, within what limits, and what truly needs escalation? |
These layers overlap. The message is visible; the missing authority takes more investigation. For the tally below, put each break in one primary column and note the trigger beside it. If the cause is unclear, mark that uncertainty. The column records your best explanation so far.
External: what keeps entering the block?
Chapter 5 does not play down the phone. It calls the phone the single largest source of fragmentation and keeps it out of the room during protected blocks, so moving yours was a sound first step. The rest of this layer often lives on the laptop: an open inbox, a chat badge, a metrics tab. Count the checks you start yourself as well. The chapter’s example is refreshing Stripe for the fourth time before lunch, which feels like working.
Ask whether the information serves the task in front of you. If it does, use it. If it does not, choose when to review it and close the input until then. The chapter defends attention with physical friction, protected blocks and batched review. It treats AI drafts like inbound email: captured, queued and processed in a block.
Make the boundary specific enough to follow: “I will review routine messages after I finish these forecast assumptions.” Keep a route for duties that cannot wait. The purpose is to protect one piece of work, with a known return to everything else.
Internal: what are you trying not to forget?
An open loop is an unfinished commitment, question or decision you keep revisiting. Chapter 5 defines rumination as “the repetitive, unproductive turning-over of a problem”: it feels like analysis and delivers no result. Both belong in the internal column when they pull you away from the work you chose. The chapter calls this layer quieter and more expensive, because it respects no device setting.
The chapter’s practical response is cognitive offloading: using external action or storage to reduce what you must hold in mind. Trust is the mechanism. A system you only half-trust makes your brain keep a shadow copy, so you pay the storage cost twice. Use one capture place you will review, and give each actionable item a next action and a return time instead of another vague reminder.
“Investor reply” names a topic. “Draft a response to the pricing objection at 15:00” names work you can return to. Writing the second line does not settle the objection. It gives the unfinished task a place and an appointment; test whether that lets you get back to the forecast.
For a recurring worry loop, chapter 5 sets an appointment: a daily twenty-minute window with a notebook. When the worry arrives outside that slot, note it and return to the present. The chapter adds a stop rule: if the appointment increases distress or starts to feel compulsive, that is a signal for professional support, not for more technique.
Match storage to sensitivity. Chapter 5 keeps cap-table math, unreleased IP and personnel notes in access-controlled storage, not a consumer notes app. A note helps only if you know where it went and when you will look again.
Systemic: what makes checking part of the job?
If only you can approve a routine discount, muting chat leaves the approval waiting. Willpower cannot grant the sales lead authority. The process needs a decision about who may act. Chapter 5 calls this layer structural, not personal.
The chapter also names a belief that invites much of this fragmentation: the reachability trap, the assumption that a good founder is instantly reachable. Reply within minutes and the team learns the access path, which is to interrupt you. Under normal operating conditions, the chapter argues, a team that cannot get through ninety minutes without you is showing a dependency problem, not your importance.
Agree who owns the decision, the limits of that authority, when routine questions get a response, and how urgent exceptions reach someone responsible. Then model the rule yourself. The team reads behavior, not policy, the chapter notes: answer non-emergency chat at 23:00 and you have made 23:00 the standard.
This applies the argument in founder capacity as infrastructure to the team: give the arrangement an owner and inspect whether it holds. A calendar entry alone does not arrange coverage.
Keep real duties in view. Chapter 5 rules out rigid disconnection during on-call, caregiving, safety, legal, security or operational emergency duties, and asks you to redesign the boundary around the duty. Handling a necessary interruption is not a failed focus exercise.
Worked example: the phone stayed in another room
Hypothetical example. A software founder protects her morning to revise a sales forecast. Her phone stays outside the room. By lunch, the assumptions are still unfinished. Her first thought is to make the next block stricter.
On the next working day, she records each break from intended work:
| Primary layer | Tally | What her notes show |
|---|---|---|
| External | 3 | One desktop mail alert and two dashboard refreshes unrelated to the current task. |
| Internal | 5 | Replaying an investor’s objection and remembering an unanswered reference request. |
| Systemic | 8 | Routine discount questions that the sales lead has no authority to resolve. |
All counts and rules in this example are invented to show the method.
The discount requests arrived through chat, but she puts them under systemic. Her note is specific: “Sales lead needs my permission for standard renewal discounts.” Switching off chat would hide the requests while leaving the approval requirement intact.
She starts there. Together, they write a trial agreement:
- The sales lead may approve discounts up to 5% on standard annual renewals, within the company’s existing pricing constraints.
- Requests outside that authority go into one queue for the founder’s review at 13:00.
- A request that needs an earlier decision must state the deadline and why it cannot wait, then use their agreed urgent route.
The percentage and review time are illustrative choices, not recommended benchmarks. Before starting, they check that the lead has the information and capacity to make those decisions.
During the next comparable forecast block, she checks whether the same requests interrupt her and whether she completes the intended assumptions. Afterwards, they also check whether routine renewals proceeded and whether exceptions received answers in time. Fewer messages would mean little if the work merely stalled elsewhere.
The example identifies something to test. It does not supply an improvement figure or show that the new agreement produces a better forecast. It also says nothing about the phone, which stayed out of the room all morning. On a day it sits on your desk, your tally may point straight to it.
What does the largest column tell you?
It tells you where to inspect first. It does not tell you how much attention you lost.
One brief alert and one long return to an unresolved conversation each earn a mark. Add a short note when a break was especially disruptive or involved a necessary duty. Those notes keep frequency from becoming the only measure that matters.
Read the largest column for a repeated, avoidable demand. If the column is full of necessary incident work, preserve that responsibility and examine coverage or other demands on the day. If two columns are close, choose a specific demand with a change you can test, rather than forcing a winner.
Keep the comparison narrow. Did that demand recur? Did the agreement work? Did the intended output advance? One quieter day gives you a reason to keep observing. Different workloads, deadlines and tasks prevent it from proving what caused the difference.
What if the room is quiet and focus still fails?
Then leave room for explanations outside the tally. A page with few marks does not show that the conditions for work are good.
Check the task itself. Can you name the next result? Do you have the information needed to produce it? Flow is a condition of work examines the adjacent questions of goals, feedback and challenge. Those deserve inspection when interruptions are scarce but the work stays stuck.
Then check recovery. Chapter 5 reads shrinking focus blocks as an early signal of recovery debt and warns against answering it with more discipline, caffeine or hours. Recovery is not a day off develops that separate question. This audit cannot diagnose persistent concentration difficulties or show that a communication rule will resolve them.
Try this today
Use one working day to get a first record. The book’s full worksheet runs over three days; this shorter version is a practical adaptation.
- Make three columns: external, internal and systemic. Keep the record private. Chapter 5 treats the audit as diagnostic data for your eyes only, not a performance artifact for investors, the board or your reports.
- Name the intended work. Before a block, write a concrete output: “Revise the forecast’s three main assumptions.” That gives each break a reference point.
- Tally each break you notice. Make one mark in the best-fitting column and add a few words about the trigger. An approval request caused by missing authority goes under systemic, with “chat” in the note. Mark uncertain assignments.
- Note how soon it needed you. Chapter 5’s worksheet asks whether an interruption truly needed you in 15 minutes, two hours, today, or never. Use that check to separate a genuine duty from a request that could wait, and do not redesign availability around a tally without accounting for real duties.
- Inspect the largest column and choose one change. For external inputs, set access and review times. For internal loops, capture a next action and a return time, or give a recurring worry its daily window. For systemic demands, agree authority, response timing and exceptions with the people affected.
- Write the next check. Name who will make the change and the next comparable work block in which to inspect it. Check whether the demand recurred, whether the intended work advanced, and whether other necessary work kept moving.
Finish with a sentence you can use: “The demand I will change is ___; the change is ___; I will check it during ___.”
Cite this:Attention leak vs distraction: why putting your phone away is not enough.Len P. van der Hof. https://lenvanderhof.com/en/blog/attention-leak-vs-distraction/ ·