You will be able to explain attention residue and design your day to reduce it.
You're halfway through a budget forecast and a little stuck, so you check your email. There's a message from a client about a delayed delivery. You don't reply, it can wait, and you go back to the spreadsheet. But for the next while, part of your mind is on the client. You read the same row three times. You start drafting the reply in your head. The forecast, which was hard enough already, now feels harder.
That glance at email took ten seconds. Its cost was much longer. This lesson explains why, and what you can do about it.
Sophie Leroy, a professor of management now at the University of Washington Bothell, studied what happens to people's attention when they move from one task to another. In a 2009 paper she described attention residue: when you switch from task A to task B, part of your attention stays on task A. The residue is stronger when task A was left unfinished, which is exactly what happens when you glance at an email in the middle of something else.
In her experiments, people who still had residue from an earlier task performed worse on the next one. In practice this means that when you switch, you do not arrive at the new task with your full attention. You arrive with what is left over, and it takes time for the rest to catch up.
The email example shows the problem. You haven't really switched to the email, since you did not deal with it. You have also not fully stayed with the forecast, because the email is now an unfinished task sitting in your head. You've paid the cost of a switch without getting anything done on either side.
Many people describe themselves as good at multitasking. For simple tasks that use different kinds of attention, such as walking and talking, doing two things at once is easy. For two tasks that both need thinking, such as writing a report and following a Teams chat, what feels like doing both at once is usually rapid switching between them.
Each switch has a cost: a moment to reload where you were, some residue from the task you left, a little more chance of an error. A single switch costs little, but forty switches in a morning add up to a morning where you were busy the whole time and finished less than you expected.
A hybrid workday makes this worse in a specific way. At home, chat pings and email arrive with nobody around to see whether you respond. In the office, a colleague walks over to ask a quick question. Both are switches. Neither is wrong, but if you do not decide when to take them, they decide for you.
You can't remove switches from a working day. You can reduce the unplanned ones and make the planned ones cleaner.
The blocks from lesson 3.3, Give important tasks a time on the calendar, already help. Messages and admin go into their own blocks, so they don't cut into your focus blocks. Within a focus block, close email and chat entirely rather than minimising them. A badge counting unread messages is an invitation to switch.
Group similar shallow work together. Replying to ten emails in a row is fewer switches than replying to ten emails scattered across the day, because each one leaves less residue when the next is the same kind of task.
Watch for the self-interruption. Many switches are not triggered by anyone else. You hit a hard part of the task and reach for your phone. Notice that moment. If you can sit through the discomfort for a minute or two, it often passes, and you are past the hard bit.
Sometimes you have to switch before the task is finished: a meeting starts, a fire breaks out, the day ends. When that happens, the residue from an unfinished task is strongest. A small habit reduces it. Before moving on, take thirty seconds to write a note on where you are and what the next step is. "Got to row 48 of the forecast. Next: check the Q3 marketing figure with Daniel, then do the summary tab."
That note does two jobs. It tells your mind that the task is recorded and you'll be able to pick it up, which makes it easier to let go. Leroy's later research with Theresa Glomb tested a version of this, a quick plan for resuming the task, and found it helped people focus on the next one. It also makes coming back faster, because you don't have to work out where you were.
Priya started writing these notes at the end of each focus block, in the task itself. She found she stopped thinking about the brief during her afternoon meetings, and that starting again the next morning took a couple of minutes instead of twenty.
Before you change anything, it helps to see how often you switch now. Most people are surprised by the count, especially by how many switches came from themselves rather than from someone else.
For one morning, note every switch between tasks and what triggered it, then count the total.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).