You’re trying to write an email. You know what you want to say. It isn’t a particularly difficult email. But someone is talking nearby, your phone keeps lighting up, and in twenty minutes you need to leave.
You write a sentence, delete it, and start again. The words aren’t coming out right. You keep losing track of what you were trying to say. Eventually you give up and close it.
Later that evening, you open the email again. The room is quiet now. There’s nowhere you need to be. Your phone is charging in the other room.
You read what you wrote earlier, delete most of it, and start again. Five minutes later, the email is finished.
Nothing happened to your ability to write an email between afternoon and evening. You didn’t become more disciplined or figure out what was wrong with you. You were trying to do the same thing under different conditions.
This is easy to miss. When something is difficult, attention tends to go immediately to the difficulty itself. You try to concentrate harder, be more patient, find the right words, make yourself continue.
Sometimes that is what the situation requires. But sometimes there is something else to work with: the noise, the interruptions, the time available, what you’re already carrying, who is there, what happened just before, or what you know is coming next.
You may not be able to change all of it. Often you can’t. But you may be able to change something.
And sometimes changing that is more useful than asking yourself, once again, to try harder.