The brain is surprisingly bad at switching tasks.
In their book The Distracted Mind, Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen write about how the brain can’t simultaneously maintain multiple attention targets. “When we simultaneously pursue multiple goals that compete for cognitive control resources,” they write, “our brains switch between tasks—they do not parallel process.”¹
And every task-switch comes with a cost.
You’ve experienced the cost of switching your attention from one target (e.g. a task) to another (e.g. an inbox).
You are concentrating on a task then in a moment of cognitive challenge, you click the email icon for just a quick check of your inbox. There’s an email with a reminder of that call you agreed to jump on, there’s an email with a new assignment/obligation, and an email with an irrelevant notification from LinkedIn. After just a quick check, you bring your attention back to the task. A few minutes in, you realize your attention is divided: while trying to focus on the task, your mind is also writing potential replies to get out of that call or cursing that new assignment dropped on you or wondering what you did that led LinkedIn to believe you might be a good fit for that Pharmaceutical Sales Representative job in Missouri.
This cognitive effect is what psychologists call “Attention Residue.”²
Attention Residue was coined in a paper titled, “Why Is It So Hard To Do My Work?” by Dr. Sophie Leroy. Leroy studied the effect of Attention Residue by forcing task switches. When you switch your attention from one target to another, part of your attention stays back with the previous target.
Knowledge work performance is highly driven by the regulation of attention. “Undivided attention makes people more cognitively vigilant and intellectually alert,” Leroy writes.³
Divided attention reduces cognitive capabilities and destroys performance.
There are ways to minimize the destruction caused by Attention Residue. Three I’ve found particularly helpful:
- time block
- embrace boredom
- close the loop
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[1] Time Block
Each morning, I build a plan in 1-hr blocks. A to-do list tells you what to do; time blocking tells you when to do it. Time blocks are like guardrails around attention, preventing distraction and rumination.
Here’s what a time blocked schedule might look like:
[2] Embrace boredom
An athlete can hurt on-field performance by what they do off-field (poor nutrition, sleep etc.); so too can a knowledge worker.
For example, when you relieve every hint of boredom⁴ with your smartphone, you condition your brain to not tolerate a state of undivided attention.
[3] Close the loop
David Allen defines “open loops”⁵ as any incomplete pulling at your attention.
Before you switch from a task to another, complete the task or clarify when/where/how you will complete the task. A plan tells your mind it can release task-related thoughts.
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I’ve found it helpful to think of the brain as if it’s a cupboard.
The biographer Andrew Roberts has written about Napoleon’s “extraordinary capacity for compartmentalizing his mind.” For over a quarter of a century, Roberts has studied and written extensively about many titanic figures for other biographies, books on military commanders, books on the leaders of history-shaping events, and on and on. More than anyone else, Roberts writes, “Napoleon was capable of a ruthless control over what he wanted to think about at any one time.”
With the enormous demands on Napoleon’s mind, energy, and time, Napoleon was proud of his ability to sequentially process—always and only devoting his concentration to one thing at a time. “Different subjects and different affairs are arranged in my head as in a cupboard,” he said. “When I wish to interrupt one train of thought, I shut that drawer and open another. Do I wish to sleep? I simply close all the drawers, and there I am—asleep.”
On the night before what would be the bloodiest battle in history up to that point and for the next century, for instance, Napoleon shut that drawer and opened another: he spent the night dictating over a hundred rules for a girls school he was preparing to open in the outskirts of Paris. Napoleon raised France to heights it’d yet seen thanks to his “capacity to compartmentalize his brain and focus entirely on each subject at a time of his own choosing.”⁶
It makes you wonder what you could do once you set up work flows and habits that minimize the negative impact of Attention Residue.
Sources:
[1] The Distracted Mind by Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen
[2] I first learned about the concept of Attention Residue in Deep Work by Cal Newport
[3] Why is it so hard to do my work? by Sophie Leroy
[4] For more on embracing boredom, it was the theme in an edition of my weekly newsletter, which you can read here.
[5] Getting Things Done by David Allen
[6] The Mind of Napoleon: The Power of Compartmentalization by Andrew Roberts