You were in the middle of a migration.
A banner slid in
at the top right of the screen.
Quick question about the invoice export,
is it possible to...
And it ended there.
You did not open it.
You were proud of that.
You kept typing.
But part of you
was already thinking about the export.
What the question could be.
Whether it was the bug from last week.
Who was asking,
and how annoyed they sounded.
The migration got your hands.
The export
got the rest.
There is research on this.
Sophie Leroy called it
attention residue.
When you leave a task
before it is finished,
part of your attention
stays behind with it,
and you do worse
at whatever you turn to next.
A preview is the purest form of that.
It hands you the start
of a new task,
too little to act on,
too much to ignore.
You did not switch.
You just started carrying it.
So cut the residue at the source.
Turn off previews.
Keep the banner if you must
know that something arrived,
but not what it says.
A name is easy to set aside.
Half a question
is not.
Read messages in batches,
at times you chose,
when you can deal with them
completely.
And when something
does pull you off a task,
spend thirty seconds before you go.
Leroy has a later study on this.
Writing a short plan
for where you will pick up
made the residue smaller.
One line.
Next, check the null handling
in step three.
Then you can leave,
because the unfinished thing
has somewhere to live
that is not your head.
The cost of a message
is not the time you spend reading it.
It is the time you spend
half reading it,
in the back of your mind,
while you do something else.
Close the tab
inside your head.
Even the ones
you never opened.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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