New to TS4... my sims appear to have zero attention span... is this normal?

It feels like this has gotten worse in the past week though. I have a sim in the freelancer career, IT branch, and getting them to complete a job has been a nightmare. I click on, for example ‘complete report’, they work for 10 secs and then walk away. I’ve had to repeat this about 5 times just to complete which never happened previously. The same is happening with the practice programming interaction too. It used to be that they’d carry on programming until I cancelled the interaction, now they just wander off to watch tv!