There is simply too much information in our environment to process. Attention allows for the selective processing of relevant information, at the expense of other information. Importantly, attention has both a spatial and a temporal distribution. While the spatial distribution of attention has commonly been measured by having individuals attend to one location over another, the temporal distribution of attention has been studied by examining the influence that selecting and processing one item has on the processing of subsequently presented information. For instance, in studies of the attentional blink (AB), two targets are presented in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of distractors. When the second target (T2) is presented within 200-500 ms after the first target (T1), there is a substantial decrease in accuracy on the T2 task. In contrast to the spatial distribution of attention, this decrease in accuracy has commonly been attributed to a failure of attention at a post-perceptual, or late, level of selection. While T1-difficulty has been studied extensively, as it has important theoretical contributions, studies attributing the AB to post-perceptual processes have repeatedly failed to manipulate task difficulty. This is particularly problematic, as task difficulty has been found to be critical to observe the influence of attention on earlier perceptual processing. The current experiments critique and falsify previous attempts to explain the influence of T1-difficulty, show that T1-difficulty influences early perceptual processing of task-irrelevant information, and demonstrate that flexible processing of T2 occurs independent of T1-difficulty. In short, these experiments disprove one of the most basic assumptions regarding the temporal distribution of attention and prove that flexible processing of information is not only a basic characteristic of attention in space, but also in time.