This is an environment, not a character flaw

You are not failing a test that used to be easy.

A lot of the private guilt around attention rests on an assumption that the difficulty is personal. If concentrating is hard, the reasoning goes, that is a fact about you. But the surroundings have been shaped, deliberately and skilfully, by many people whose work was to shape them. Finding it hard to concentrate in an environment engineered to fragment concentration is roughly what you would predict. It is a completely ordinary outcome.

The reason this framing is worth adopting is not comfort, though it is more comfortable. It is that guilt is a poor instrument for change. Guilt suggests trying harder at the same thing, which mostly produces more guilt. Seeing the situation as environmental suggests changing the environment, which is slower to start and considerably more likely to work, because it does not require you to win the same argument with yourself every hour.

This is also where it is worth saying one thing plainly and then leaving it alone. If difficulty concentrating is persistent, is not explained by your circumstances, and is genuinely getting in the way of your life, that is a conversation for a doctor rather than an article. Everything here assumes an ordinary situation with ordinary demands, which is the situation most people are actually in.