Brain Food: Loyal to Distractions

“Absent Without Leave: A Neuroenergetic Theory of Mind Wandering.”

there’s a large cognitive cost to switching your attention from one target to another. Any workflow that requires you to constantly tend conversations unfolding in an inbox or chat channel is going to diminish the quality of your brain’s output.

One study at the University of Loughborough found that after reading an email, which took two minutes on average, it then took people an average of sixty-eight seconds to return to their work and remember what they were doing.45 It is estimated that unnecessary interruptions and the time needed to get our brain back on track after being distracted

“a lot of back-and-forth emails, Slack, last-minute Zoom meetings, etc., which prevent me (and everyone in general, I feel) from actually having the time to do deep work, think, write, with high quality.”

knowledge workers operate as a state of “divided attention,” in which the mind rarely gets closure before switching tasks, creating a muddle of competing activations and inhibitions that all add up to reduce our performance.