What I Learned After Tracking Every Distraction for 7 Days

This Is Why Focus Is Harder Than It Looks

I have never thought of myself a particularly distracted person. But lately, I’ve began to notice a sense of frustration that my days were dissolving away and nothing to show for them. I’d sit down with the best intentions to work or write or even enjoy something only to find myself be pulled away. Not just once but dozens and dozens of times. So I did what I do best. I tracked it. I told myself I’d keep a log for a week and record the things that pulled me out of focus. How bad could it really be right?

The answer? Wayyyyyyy worse that I could’ve possibly expected.

On the first day of my tracking, my phone told me I had picked it up 124 times. Not in a week. I’m literally just talking about the first day. That’s roughly once every 12 minutes of my waking life. I averaged about 89 pickups per day across the week with my screen time clocking in at 6h 47m. Six hours and forty-seven minutes of average daily screen time. That’s not an outlier; that was my baseline. Multiply that across seven days and it adds up to almost forty-eight hours. Two full days of my week were spent staring into a slab of glass. Most used apps? X, Instagram, Youtube, and TikTok. 12 hours on just X (formally Twitter) throughout the week. On top of that, I was averaging 328 notifications a day. That means that even if I had the strength of a monk, I would be resisting over 300 attempts of something trying to take my attention. Imagine trying to read a book while someone tapped you on the shoulder three hundred times in an afternoon. It’s absurd when you put it in that context right? Yet I have accepted it as normal life.

But numbers only tell part of the story. The deeper truth came in noticing the shape of my distraction. I quickly came to realize that Youtube wasn’t just my biggest distraction but it became a soundtrack to my life. I had it on while eating, or in the background while I “worked”. It had become a crutch. A constant background presence I leaned on to avoid silence. This little subtle habit I was developing was training me to be incapable of stillness. Even the act of eating felt incomplete without some voice spilling out of my laptop or phone, telling me stories I wasn’t even fully listening to. The other giant sinkhole of attention was my computer. More specifically the fact that my work computer also doubled as a fully loaded gaming machine. Every time I sat down to do something meaningful, I had the ghost of my entire Steam library whispering in my ear. Discord open on the other monitor, watching as my friends were playing a game we had all bought together. “You can just work later. They’re going to get off soon any way. You can finish it then.” I felt the pull. Constantly. Just knowing it was there. That the chance was there. Was enough to erode my focus. Eventually I started to work on my Macbook at the kitchen table instead. No games installed. No second or third monitor. Just my laptop and the bare necessities. I realized something crucial in this shift though. My digital environment is just as important as my physical one. We talk about decluttering our desks but rarely talk about decluttering the software landscape on our devices. The effect remains the same. Remove temptations and your brain doesn’t have to fight so hard.

The act of tracking these distractions changed me. It’s hard to notice a pattern while you’re inside it, but when you start writing it down, “picked up phone,” “opened YouTube,” “thought about MTG cards”, the invisible becomes visible. At first, it was discouraging. I felt like I was documenting my failures. But slowly, I started seeing the data less as evidence of weakness and more as a kind of map. Each distraction pointed to something: a craving, a need, a moment of boredom, a lack of energy. Distractions weren’t random. They were cues.

YouTube wasn’t simply stealing my attention. It was giving me easy comfort when I didn’t want to face silence. Video games weren’t just pulling me away. They were offering escape when the work felt heavy or unclear. Even my phone pickups, excessive as they were, weren’t random ticks. They were a nervous loop, a ritual of reassurance: maybe there’s a message, maybe someone needs me, maybe something new has happened. Every glance was an answer to an unspoken question. Once I saw that, the experiment stopped being about beating myself up for being distracted and started being about curiosity. Why do I feel the need to have YouTube on in the background? Why is silence so uncomfortable? Why do I pick up my phone nearly ninety times a day? The tracking turned my distractions into a mirror, and what I saw wasn’t laziness or lack of willpower.

Noticing didn’t automatically fix anything though. My numbers didn’t suddenly drop because I kept a log. I didn’t delete YouTube or sell my gaming PC. Instead, what shifted was how I thought about environments. I learned that fighting distraction in the moment is like trying to hold back the ocean with your hands. The better move is to just walk away from the ocean. Working from my MacBook in the kitchen was one of the ways I walked away from the ocean. Taking away the possibility of gaming meant I didnt have to resist it. Leaving my phone in another room while writing was another. Suddenly, I wasn’t exercising “discipline.” I was just shaping an environment where discipline wasn’t constantly being tested.

There’s an irony here. We tend to think of attention as an individual resource, like willpower we can flex if we’re strong enough. But the week I tracked my distractions convinced me otherwise. Attention is relational. It’s shaped by the spaces we’re in, the tools we use, the cultural scripts we follow. If my phone buzzes 328 times in a day, of course I’m going to pick it up. If my desk is the same place I play video games, of course my brain is going to blend those associations. If YouTube has trained me to never eat in silence, of course my body is going to feel restless without it. That realization changed the way I framed distraction. It wasn’t that I was “bad” at focusing. It was that I was living in an ecosystem designed for scattering attention. Every app, every notification, every easy entertainment option was a tug on the line. And when you multiply that by a week, the results are staggering. I’d wanted to prove I wasn’t so bad, that maybe I just needed a few tweaks to sharpen up. Instead, the data told me I was living in a storm of interruptions.

The week ended, but the experiment hasn’t really stopped. I find myself more cautious now when I open YouTube. I’m more deliberate about where I work. The overarching lesson is simple but hard to live: distractions aren’t failures. If you track them, you stop treating them like invisible thieves of time and start treating them like guides to how you actually live. YouTube told me I crave companionship. My games told me I crave escape. My phone told me I crave reassurance. They were signals. The challenge now is not to eliminate them, but to decide how much space they get in my life.

So if you ever want to understand your own mind, try it. Track your distractions for a week. Not to punish yourself, but to reveal the invisible architecture of your days. You’ll also be surprised at what those numbers mean.

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