Growth Spurt: The Hidden Cost of Task Switching

Imagine this, you just finished a meeting, and you go to your office, you sit down to get back to work on writing some document you've been trying to get put together.

And 30 minutes later, you realize you've only got four sentences written down.

Your phone is face down, it's on silent, you're not looking at your emails.

So where is the distraction coming from? And here's the surprising answer.

It's actually coming from the last thing you were doing.

Now, there's a name for this.

And researcher Sophie Leroy, who has studied attention at the University of Washington, calls it attention residue.

In her research, she found that when you task switch, so going from task A to task B, part of your attention actually stays there.

on that previous task A.

You physically moved on to a new task, but your mind hasn't fully transitioned yet.

And one of the key findings is that this task switching effect is strongest when that first task is left feeling unfinished, rushed, or emotionally charged.

The tense conversation that you didn't quite get to resolve with a colleague, your brain keeps running it back on a loop, almost like a browser tab you forgot to close down on your laptop.

It's quietly kind of draining your energy and your focus so that you can't fully attend to the new task or what's in front of you now.

Now, over the course of the day, that stacks up, right? We get dozens of these switches a day where we go from sending an email to a meeting or from a meeting to working on a project, from working on a project to getting pinged with a quick question.

And each of these instances leaves a little bit of residue, right? By afternoon, you can feel like you've worked a full day, fully drained, but at the same time, feel like you've only been operating at 50%.

So what do you do about this? You've gotta give your brain a way to close the loop on each task.

So before you switch a task, going from task A to task B, take 30 to 60 seconds to close the loop.

And you can do this by writing a close the loop note, something simple such as where am I leaving this task, the current status, just really identifying in one sentence where you're leaving it off.

And then the latter part is, what's my next step? When I return to this task, where am I picking up? And that's it.

It really is this short, simple process for closing the loop so that when you go to task B, you're no longer worried or continuing to have this residue around task A that maybe wasn't quite completed or that there are follow-up steps with.

So try this the next time that you're dealing with a day of task switching and and see what impacts it has on your productivity.