How can we focus in a wild world
Team note · Attention & interruptions
Your brain cannot do two demanding things at once. It puts one down and picks the other up, over and over. That feels like multitasking. It is switching, and every switch costs time and accuracy. So work does not get finished, because we keep leaving it, and errors creep in, because your place in a task is lost every time you look away. Most of the interruptions causing it come from each other, and they are cheap to send and expensive to receive.
Average time on a screen before switching. In 2004 it was two and a half minutes.
Average time on one piece of work before moving to another.
Average delay before an interrupted task is picked up again.
The rise in errors after an interruption lasting three seconds.
With yourself
Six things you control
- Notifications off. Both devices. Off, not down. A silent banner is still a banner. Just receiving one raises your error rate, even if you never look.
- Phone in another room. Not face down, not in your bag. Silencing it does not help and nor does switching it off. Distance does.
- One task, one tab. Every open tab is an unfinished job your brain is holding open. Bookmark the rest into Later and close them.
- Work in protected blocks. Half an hour is a sensible size. Write down the one thing that will be finished before you start.
- Park stray thoughts on paper. “I must email Sarah” gets written down, not acted on. Deal with the list after the block.
- Take a real break after each one. Five minutes, away from the screen. Scrolling is not a break, it is another job.
With each other
Six we control together
- Put the actual question in the first line. No “have you got a sec”. That takes two interruptions from someone to save you one sentence.
- Say the urgency. “No rush, Thursday is fine.” Four words, and the other person can stop guessing. Guessing is what makes people check.
- Batch, do not drip. Three questions in one message, not three messages as they occur to you.
- Assume nothing needs an answer within the hour. Same day is the normal expectation, not same minute.
- Cluster the meetings. Same number of meetings, completely different day. Scattered ones leave no usable stretch at all.
- Hard thinking in the late morning. Not the first hour after waking, when you are still foggy. Then protect that stretch from meetings.
What a protected half hour buys you
Illustration, not a measurement. Four switches in half an hour is a quiet morning by the standards of the numbers above. The striped part is what nobody counts, because it does not feel like an interruption. It feels like working.
About afternoons
Afternoons really are harder. Alertness dips between roughly 2pm and 4pm, and a big lunch deepens it.
But how long you have been going matters more than the hour on the clock. Across two million school tests, scores fell steadily through the day, and a 20 to 30 minute break bought back around two hours of that decline.
So the afternoon is not a write off. Treat the slump as the signal to break properly rather than push through, and put the work that needs least of you there.