Most focus advice assumes your distraction has one cause and one fix: silence the phone, use a timer, try harder. But two people can sit at the same desk, phones face-down, and lose their attention through completely different mechanisms ? and the fix for one can quietly make the other worse.

Scattered, Not Broken starts from a different premise: scattered attention isn't one problem, it's a symptom with at least five distinct causes, each with its own signature and its own fix. You'll learn why your own memory of your focus is far less reliable than you think, how to run a simple three-day audit that catches lapses in real time instead of guessing after the fact, and how to sort what you find into the specific pattern ? interruption, residue, disengagement, escape, or rhythm ? actually driving your attention away. Along the way, this book corrects some of the most popular (and most wrong) ideas about dopamine "detoxes" and untangles the difference between a distraction worth eliminating and a wandering mind quietly doing something useful.

No generic checklist. No promise of permanent, frictionless focus ? that doesn't exist, and any book claiming otherwise is selling something. Just a clear, evidence-based way to find out which kind of scattered you actually are, and fixes built for that specific pattern instead of someone else's.

If you've tried the standard advice and it only half-worked, this is the book that explains why ? and what to do instead.