Is this advice aimed at your problem?
Name your difficulty, name the tip. Find out whether it points at your problem or the reverse of it.
The short version
- "I cannot concentrate" is at least five different problems. Most advice was built for one of them and can be the exact opposite of what another one needs.
- Pick which of the five you actually have, say what the tip changes, and the tool tells you whether it is aimed at you, aimed at your opposite, or genuinely neutral.
- You leave with a stopping rule in your own words (if this happens, this one is not mine) so giving up on it means nothing about you.
Someone tells you to put music on and it transformed their working life; you try it for a fortnight and get less done. You were not the problem. Music was built for a particular difficulty, and you may not have that difficulty. The advice was fine. The aim was off. This tool asks what the tip is for before you spend another week proving something about yourself that was never true.
Before you begin
Have one specific piece of advice in mind, something you were told to try, or something already chosen for you. Three short answers, then a verdict and a stopping rule you can copy out. Nothing you type is saved.
Questions
Question 1 of 3
The verdict
Take your stopping rule with you
Select the text below and copy it into whatever you already use. Read the stopping rule again before you next try the tip. This page keeps nothing.
One question that never gets passed on with the tip
Ask the person who recommended it what it changed for them. Their answer names the aim (the difficulty it was built around) which is the part that never travels with the advice. If the aim is not yours, that is not a verdict on your effort; it is a mismatch, and mismatches are cheap to correct.
And if a tool was chosen for a whole team, it was aimed at somebody. Ask who, and what it was meant to solve. A tool required of everyone is a decision, and decisions can be revisited.
Worth knowing. This tool does not diagnose anything and returns nothing about you. It sorts what you tell it against a simple idea from the article: several common attention tips are opposites, so reducing what arrives helps someone taking in more than they can sort but is the wrong direction for someone whose attention fades when nothing changes; novelty and short blocks help attention that fades but are actively costly for attention that takes a long stretch to get into something. The verdict is only as good as which of the five you picked, and picking is itself the useful part.
Nothing here is saved or sent anywhere. What you type exists only while this page is open.
Written for Thought Club as general guidance, not medical advice. Free to read, print, and share.