Switch-cost effect and Attention Residue
There’s a reason that distractions threaten your work output: every time you are distracted, it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task. Which is to say that every time you pause your “grind” to do a little YouTube wormholing, you are increasing your “super hard” workday by the length of a lawn-care video, plus 23 minutes and 15 seconds.
Switch-cost effect
Our brain can only produce one or two thoughtsin our conscious mind at once. That’s it.We’re very, very single-minded.We havevery limited cognitive capacity.
But we have fallen for an enormous delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow six forms of media at the same time. When neuroscientists studied this, they found that when people believe they are doing several things at once, they are actually juggling. They’re switching back and forth. They don’t notice the switching because their brain sort of papers it over to give a seamless experience of consciousness, but what they’re actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment-to-moment, task-to-task – [and] that comes with a cost.
We often switch what we’re doing every few minutes, and these frequent interruptions “cause us to work faster, which causes more stress, higher frustration, time pressure, and effort.” And this sabotages not just our performance but the way we “show up” in the world.
Think about deep work as needing
brainpower momentum. It takes time to get started, get focused, and fully mobilize our resources in the service of our most important, most meaningful work.
By “resources,” I mean not only our knowledge, wisdom, and experience, but also our empathy, passion, kindness, diligence and all of the other qualities we bring to our day-to-day lives to make them unique, richer and have more impact. The phrase I use to describe building this momentum in the service of a task, experience, or connection is “unleashing our genius.”
Imagine, say, you are doing your tax return, and you receive a text, and you look at it – it’s only a glance, taking three seconds – and then you go back to your tax return. In that moment,
your brain has to reconfigure, when it goes from one task to another.
You have to remember what you were doing before, and you have to remember what you thought about it.
When this happens, the evidence shows that your performance drops. You’re slower. All as a result of the switching.
Consider this analogy: imagine your task is to ride a bicycle for 10 miles. You begin to pedal and just as you build up speed and start making progress, something unexpectedly makes you hit the brakes. Because you had to stop, you’ve lost your momentum and have to expend more effort to get going again. Imagine you are forced to brake every time you start to go faster. You can never coast. You have to pedal — hard — all the time. How much longer do you think it’s going to take you to get to your destination? How much more difficult and frustrating do you think it’s going to be? This is your brain power on distraction, and it causes unsatisfying, unfulfilling work days.
You cannot fully unleash your genius in the three-minute increments you have between distractions. Unfortunately, for many of us distraction has become a habit — one that has been so often and routinely reinforced that it is extremely difficult to break.
This is called the switch-cost effect. It means that if you check your texts while trying to work, you aren’t only losing the little bursts of time you spend looking at the texts themselves – you are also losing the time it takes to refocus afterwards, which turns out to be a huge amount. For example, one study at the Carnegie Mellon University’s human computer interaction lab took 136 students and got them to sit a test. Some of them had to have their phones switched off, and others had their phones on and received intermittent text messages. The students who received messages performed, on average, 20% worse.
Almost all of us are currently losing that 20% of our brainpower, almost all the time. As a result, we now live in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation.
Those of us habituated to distraction will find that we have shorter attention spans and less patience for applying our brainpower in a meaningful way. We now see it as an unpleasant and insurmountable task, which means we are less likely to build the brainpower momentum needed to unleash our genius. The problems associated with distraction have thus compounded: our ability to engage in thoughtful work has decreased, as has our desire to actually do it.
Attention Residue
The simple act of checking your emails for 30 seconds in the middle of a work block puts your mind in a more destructive state for up to 30 minutes after the initial check according to Cal Newport, the author of the best-selling book “Deep work”, who calls this switching between two different tasks attention and residue - being likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task.
From “Deep work”
High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
By maximizing your intensity when you work, you maximize the results you produces per unit of time spent working.
Something I noticed in my research process for my second book, How to Become a Straight-A Student, and the interviews I did with around fifty ultra-high-scoring college undergraduates from some of the country’s most competitive schools, is that, the very best students often studied less than the group of students right below them on the GPA rankings.
One of the explanations for this phenomenon turned out to be the formula detailed earlier: The best students understood the role intensity plays in productivity and therefore went out of their way to maximize their concentration—radically reducing the time required to prepare for tests or write papers, without diminishing the quality of their results.
This intensity formula applies to any cognitively demanding task.
But why would this be? An interesting explanation comes from Sophie Leroy, a business professor at the University of Minnesota. In a 2009 paper, titled, intriguingly, Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?, Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue. In the introduction to this paper, she noted that other researchers have studied the effect of multitasking - trying to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously - on performance, but that in the modern knowledge work office, once you got to a high enough level, it was more common to find people working on multiple projects sequentially: “Going from one meeting to the next, starting to work on one project and soon after having to transition to another is just part of life in organizations,” Leroy explains.
The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while.
Leroy studied the effect of this attention residue on performance by forcing task switches in the laboratory. In one such experiment, for example, she started her subjects working on a set of word puzzles. In one of the trials, she would interrupt them and tell them that they needed to move on to a new and challenging task, in this case, reading résumés and making hypothetical hiring decisions. In other trials, she let the subjects finish the puzzles before giving them the next task. In between puzzling and hiring, she would deploy a quick lexical decision game to quantify the amount of residue left from the first task.* The results from this and her similar experiments were clear:
People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task, and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance.
The concept of attention residue helps explain why the intensity formula is true. By working on a single hard task for a long time without switching, you minimize the negative impact of attention residue from your other obligations, allowing you to maximize performance on this one task. When you work for days in isolation on something, in other words, you are doing so at a higher level of effectiveness than your standard peers following a more distracted strategy in which the work is repeatedly interrupted by residue-slathering interruptions.
Even if you are unable to fully replicate extreme isolation, the attention residue concept is still telling, because it implies that the common habit of working in a state of semi-distraction is potentially devastating to your performance. It might seem harmless to take a quick glance at your inbox every ten minutes or so. That quick check introduces a new target for your attention. Even worse, by seeing messages that you cannot deal with at the moment (which is almost always the case), you’ll be forced to turn back to the primary task with a secondary task left unfinished. The attention residue left by such unresolved switches dampens your performance.
We see a clear argument form:
To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work. If you’re not comfortable going deep for extended periods of time, it’ll be difficult to get your performance to the peak levels of quality and quantity increasingly necessary to thrive professionally. Unless your talent and skills absolutely dwarf those of your competition, the deep workers among them will outproduce you.
Book recommendations
- Leroy, Sophie. “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 (2009): 168–181.