The silent productivity killer you've never heard of...
Attention Residue (and 4 strategies to fight back):
The concept of "attention residue" was identified by Dr. Sophie Leroy in 2009.
The idea is simple:
There is a cognitive cost to shifting your attention from one task to another. When our attention is shifted, a "residue" remains and impairs our performance on the new task.
It's relatively easy to find examples of this effect in your own life:
You get on a call but are still thinking about the prior call.
An email pops up during meeting and derails your focus.
You check your phone during a lecture and can't refocus afterwards.
If the thing is within your control, then go do something about it. If the thing is out of your control, then it's just a waste of energy to complain about it.
2. Don't allow negative people to steal your energy.
Stop avoiding difficult conversations. Embrace the need to remove toxicity from your life.
3. Do not allow more than 2 hours of inactivity.
Get up and go for a walk. Do a few pushups or lunges. Move your body regularly.
4. Do not "graze" on low-value tasks.
Parkinson's Law says that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. When you don't set fixed windows for managing low-value tasks, you end up "grazing" on them. Create short windows for processing low importance tasks.