Attention Residue: How switching tasks leaves your focus behind

Still thinking about the last task while trying to start the next one?

You finish an email, open a report, glance at a Teams notification, answer a quick question from a colleague, and then return to the report.

Except you don't really return.

Part of your attention is still with the email. You are wondering whether you should have worded something differently. The Teams message is still sitting in the back of your mind, and now you've forgotten exactly where you were in the report.

This mental overlap has a name: attention residue.

The term was introduced by organisational psychologist Sophie Leroy in her 2009 research into what happens when people switch between tasks. Her experiments found that when people moved away from an unfinished task, part of their attention remained focused on it, making it harder to perform effectively on the next task.

It's a simple idea, but it helps explain why a day full of interruptions can leave you feeling busy without necessarily feeling productive.

Your attention doesn't switch as quickly as you do

We tend to think of multitasking as something we can simply choose to do. Write a proposal for ten minutes. Check your inbox. Jump into a meeting. Answer a message. Get back to the proposal.

On the surface, each switch might only take a few seconds, but switching tasks isn't quite as frictionless as it feels.

Research into task switching has found that moving between different tasks carries a measurable cognitive cost. In a series of experiments, psychologists Joshua Rubinstein, David Meyer and Jeffrey Evans found that people took longer when alternating between different tasks, with the cost increasing as the tasks became more complex. Their research suggests that switching requires the mind to shift goals and activate the rules needed for the new task.

Attention residue adds another layer to this.

When the previous task is unfinished, it can continue competing for your attention after you've supposedly moved on. The more cognitively demanding the new task is, the more noticeable that competition can become.

The problem with the "quick question"

Some interruptions are unavoidable. A colleague needs an answer. A meeting runs over. A customer calls. Something urgent comes up.

The problem is that our working days can become filled with interruptions that don't feel significant enough to count. Each one might only take a minute, but the cost isn't necessarily the minute itself.

"Got a sec?"

"Can you just have a look at this?"

"Quick question..."

"I'll just send you this."

In research on interrupted work, Gloria Mark and colleagues found that people often compensated for interruptions by working faster, but this came with increased stress, frustration, time pressure and effort.

Earlier observational research from Mark and colleagues also found that information workers experienced highly fragmented working days, with many activities being interrupted before they could naturally reach a stopping point.

In other words, interruptions don't necessarily mean that nothing gets done.

You might still finish everything on your list.

The question is how much mental effort it took to get there.

Unfinished work is particularly sticky

Leroy's research is particularly relevant here because attention residue isn't simply about changing activities. It's strongly connected to unfinished work.

If you leave Task A halfway through to start Task B, your mind can remain partially occupied by Task A. Leroy found that this lingering attention can affect performance on the task you switch to.

That makes the modern workplace an interesting environment for studying focus.

A typical day might involve an email inbox, project management software, instant messages, meetings, phone calls and people working around you. Any one of these might interrupt a task that was already competing for your attention. Suddenly, instead of having one thing to think about, you have five. The feeling is similar to when you have plans or an appointment at 1pm, so your whole morning is spent fluffing about on minor tasks while waiting for the clock to tick down. You want to do something productive, yet that activity looming in the back of your mind is stopping your brain from engaging 100% of its mental energy and focus into a task.

Sometimes the best way to switch is to leave yourself a way back

The answer isn't necessarily to finish everything before moving on. That's rarely realistic in a modern workplace.

Interestingly, later research has explored what happens when people are interrupted before they can finish a task, and whether a simple plan for returning to that task can help.

A 2018 study by Sophie Leroy and colleagues found that creating a brief "ready-to-resume" plan before switching away from an interrupted task could reduce attention residue and help people perform better on the interrupting task.

The idea is surprisingly simple. Before you move on, leave yourself a clear point of return.

Instead of: 'I'll get back to this later'

Try: 'I've finished the introduction. Next I'll add the two examples and check the figures.'

You're not finishing the task, rather you're giving your brain somewhere to put it. By giving yourself a clear point of return, and letting you brain move on from the task without processing it in the background. Pairing this method with a focus method like Time Blocking, or the Pomodoro technique can result in a dramatic increase of meaningful productivity.

Focus isn't just about eliminating distractions

It's easy to think about focus as a matter of personal discipline.

Put your phone away. Close your tabs. Turn off notifications. Try harder. Those things can help, but they don't address the entire problem.

The environment around us also influences how frequently our attention is asked to shift.

Open-plan workplaces can make communication easier, but they can also introduce movement, conversations and spontaneous interactions into your field of attention. A conversation happening nearby doesn't have to involve you to become something your brain has to filter out.

We're not saying open workplaces are inherently bad; It means different types of work need different conditions.

A collaborative environment can be ideal when you're brainstorming with a team. The same environment might be less useful when you need to analyse a complex document, write a proposal or concentrate on a difficult problem.

Finding your focus can therefore be less about forcing yourself to concentrate and more about creating the conditions in which concentration is easier. This is where acoustic pods can play a practical role in the workplace. By creating a quieter, more contained environment away from the activity of the wider office, they give people somewhere to step into when a task needs uninterrupted attention. If something like an acoustic pod is too big, or costly for your application, other options like enclosed seating booths, and acoustic dividers that slip onto the end of your desk help to minimize the distractions of open-plan offices.

Making space for focused work

Cal Newport describes deep work as the ability to concentrate without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.

The idea isn't that every task requires hours of uninterrupted concentration. Checking an email doesn't need the same environment as writing a strategy document. Neither does a quick administrative task.

The point is to recognise when your attention is the most valuable part of the work you're doing.

When it is, protecting that attention becomes important.

That could mean setting aside uninterrupted blocks of time, grouping similar tasks together, reducing unnecessary notifications, or establishing spaces where people know that focused work is taking place.

It can also mean having somewhere to physically step away from the activity of the wider workplace.

A quiet, enclosed space won't magically make a difficult task easy, but removing some of the competing sights, sounds and interruptions around you can give your attention fewer things to process. And sometimes, that's what focus needs.

Find your focus

Attention residue is a useful reminder that switching tasks isn't always the same as switching attention. This ties directly into the myth of multitasking, where we believe we're being productive on two tasks while realistically we can't focus fully on either of them often leading to subpar work.

You can move from one task to another in seconds while part of your mind is still somewhere else.

So the next time you sit down to concentrate and find yourself thinking about the meeting you just left, the email you haven't finished or the message you still need to answer, don't necessarily blame yourself for having a short attention span.

Your attention may simply have some unfinished business.

The goal isn't to eliminate every interruption or work in complete silence all day.

It's to recognise when a task deserves your full attention, and create enough space for your mind to give it.

Sometimes, finding your focus starts with finding somewhere you can keep it.

Get ahead Monday. Take it easy Friday.

Resources Referenced:

Leroy, S. (2009). “Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168–181. Leroy, S. & Glomb, T. M. (2018). “Tasks Interrupted: How Anticipating Time Pressure on Resumption of an Interrupted Task Causes Attention Residue and Low Performance on Interrupting Tasks and How a ‘Ready-to-Resume’ Plan Mitigates the Effects.” Organization Science, 29(3), 380–397.

Rubinstein, J. S., Meyer, D. E. & Evans, J. E. (2001). “Executive Control of Cognitive Processes in Task Switching.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(4), 763–797. Mark, G., Gudith, D. & Klocke, U. (2008). “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.