How Much Time and Energy Do We Waste Toggling Between Applications?

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.

In order to move from one task to another, we must effectively tell ourselves, “I want to do this now instead of that.” This process is known as “goal shifting” or “task shifting.” It creates something called “switching time,” which is the increment of time it takes us to move from one source of focus to another.