Plan every task so you can put it down

Every time we get interrupted, we come back to our work and read the same paragraph three times, because the task we just left never really leaves our head. Sophie Leroy, a business school dean, named this attention residue in her 2009 paper "Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?", and her findings suggest it can be mitigated. Finishing the first task under time pressure helped people let go of it and do better on the next one. In a later paper (2018, with Theresa Glomb), she tested a ready-to-resume plan: a quick note, jotted down before switching, on where you stopped and what comes next.

Personally, I believe not interrupting a task is best for productivity, because switching context is expensive in mental energy. The next best thing is to plan every task, big or small, as a 'flow' or a 'stream' you can put down and come back to whenever the occasion arises. I think Leroy's ready-to-resume plan is perfect for that, and checklists and breaking the task into as many subtasks as possible help too. More recently, I started structuring my work around 'conversations', and each one comes bundled with a few other things.

• Its own Slack channel and a one-page Confluence onboarding doc, which does the job of the ready-to-resume plan.
• A Jira epic with all the tasks created during the conversation along the way.
• A bot responsible for that conversation, the one I talk to whenever I'm working on that specific thing.
• A folder for all the notes that belong to the conversation, saved regularly and processed overnight by a memory app.

The memory app indexes the notes, which is particularly useful for conversations with hundreds or even thousands of them. The index keeps the agent from drowning in the overflow of information and lets it manage a large corpus of text instead.

Cheers, and may your backlinks resolve,
Zhenia