Attention Residue — the Enemy of Work Productivity
When I recall how my past workdays turned out, I feel annoyed. Rather than dedicating myself to one project at a time, my attention was scattered between projects, emails, conversations, meetings, and text messaging. To be honest, I knew it was no good for my levels of productivity. But still, it was so much easier to give in to immediate distractions, which I believed only meant a couple of minutes wasted, now and then.
Unfortunately, the time spent in distracting activities is not limited to the actual time spent there. According to the researcher Sophie Leroy, switching from task to task leaves an attention residue — the cognitions about a task that persists, even though one has stopped working on it and has transitioned to another one. So it is not so much about the 5 minutes spent answering an email but about the attention residue that undermines work performance. It is estimated that each employee costs 4,500$ yearly by wasting time on social media during the workday. In this regard, don't think of distractions as a linear waste of time. The likelihood of these same distractions compromising your next hours of work is higher than you might believe.
Two experiments proved that to perform well in one task, people need to stop thinking about the previous one. But what happens most of the time is a constant switch from task to task, which does not make for an effective transition. From an organisational and individual perspective, working under a cognitive load is likely to affect the levels of attention in the next task negatively. Thus, what is required is the disengagement from the previous task so that the next one can be completed effectively and deep work is achieved.
These experiments highlight the importance of eliminating distractions completely. Even a quick glance at the phone can leave an attention residue that significantly decreases one's ability to focus. The solution is not of complex implementation and only requires the intention and discipline to fully dedicate a pre-defined block of time to one single task.
“The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention”