The human brain wasn’t built for all this — all of the information, screens, meetings, scheduling, thinking.

The problem is the brain hasn’t changed much since the days of hunter-gatherers, but the demands we put on it have, says Kayla Stajkovic, a lecturer in organizational behavior at the University of California, Davis. In the past, humans did a fair amount of strategizing and planning to survive, but now, we’re bombarded with emails and messages all day, we juggle calendars, attempt to multitask, and pull out our phones when we can’t think of anything better to do.

Into the breach has stepped an enormous number of productivity hacks, as well as influencers and productivity evangelists peddling easy-fix solutions. A to-do list no longer suffices when you can intricately track habits, time, goals, and progress. Setting up and customizing new systems can consume more time and energy than the tasks they’re meant to streamline. We also live in an era of ubiquitous short-form videos and AI overviews, bite-sized bits of information that are supposed to save us time, but in fact may just be fueling the desire to devour more content as quickly as possible.

Even with all these new hacks, tools, and organizational methods, it can still feel like a challenge to concentrate for a few hours a day. It isn’t that we’re undisciplined or have undiagnosed ADHD (although that certainly may be the case for some) — we’re simply pushing our minds beyond the brink of what they can reasonably do, Stajkovic says. We all have a limited reserve of attention, and many aspects of our tech-laden, productivity-focused lives deplete that mental energy.

“You could see how it would be easy for people to say we have attention problems when really the problem is the environment and how much we’re trying to fit in,” Stajkovic says. “It would be like trying to tow a boat with a Honda Civic. The boat is heavier than the car’s capacity to tow it; it’s just not going to do it. It’s not a problem with the car.........

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