I look at it like my consciousness is a program running in the foreground of the operating system, i can modify a lot of things especially if i look up the documentation but i can't alter the hardware or really low level software.

So e.g. when i really notice my attention deficiency that feels very much like the OS needs to run some background program for maintenance which takes up a bunch of RAM, leaving a lot less for me to work with and thus i discard information much more readily so that there's room for anything judged to be particularly important, and when i'm occupied with that there's simply no room left of anything else.