links.lmorchard.com - #attention

Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 03:24:13 +0000

In many jobs, employees must manage multiple projects or tasks at the same time. A typical workday often entails switching between several work activities, including projects, tasks, and meetings. This paper explores how such work design affects individual performance by focusing on the challenge of switching attention from one task to another. As revealed by two experiments, people need to stop thinking about one task in order to fully transition their attention and perform well on another. Yet, results indicate it is difficult for people to transition their attention away from an unfinished task and their subsequent task performance suffers. Being able to finish one task before switching to another is, however, not enough to enable effective task transitions. Time pressure while finishing a prior task is needed to disengage from the first task and thus move to the next task and it contributes to higher performance on the next task.

Tags: #attention #psychology #work

ongoing · Less Like Oration

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:56:08 +0000

Tags: #attention #communication #focus #writing

Joi Ito's Web: Mindfulness and deferred yak shaving

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 20:21:12 +0000

"I figure I should probably be respectful to the spirit of the promise with the "meditation me" so that I'll continue to trust my requests for deferred yak shaving during my meditation."

Tags: #attention #meditation #meta

Open the Future: Augmented Fluid Intelligence

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 17:50:44 +0000

"These kinds of bots -- attention filters, perhaps, or focus assistants -- are likely to become important parts of how we handle our daily lives."

Tags: #aggregators #ai #attention #cogsci #future #multitasking #posthumanity #rss

Liminal Existence: On Twitter

Sat, 09 Dec 2006 15:17:48 +0000

"I feel like all these emerging (emergent?) "ambient" communication technologies actually help to make me happier, and feel less alone in our highly abstract and disconnected world."

Tags: #attention #community #singularity #social #twitter

Eric Hayes, ehayes, -e: Attention Streams vs. The Fire Hose

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 20:59:34 +0000

"Think of an Attention Stream as a way of noticing all of the steps you take to gather and consume information."

Tags: #aggregation #attention #infovore #rss

Anne 2.0 - Blog Archive Mindfulness Basics: The Mindful Migraine

Sat, 10 Jun 2006 23:01:54 +0000

"Paradoxically, the best way to handle it is to attend to it, to focus on it, to be mindful of the migraine"

Tags: #attention #migraine #mindfulness

Preoccupations: Attention, Reading Lists, RSS, etc, etc

Fri, 17 Feb 2006 11:50:28 +0000

"Attention continues to get my attention." Link-dense round up of recent discussions.

Tags: #attention #metablogging #opml

Anne 2.0: Churning and Burning

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 17:06:39 +0000

"We need new paradigms for following what's happening in the blogosphere."

Tags: #attention #metablogging

Charlie's Diary - On the attention economy

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 00:58:23 +0000

"Ban the advertising industry. Ban it now, before it's too late."

Tags: #advertising #attention #future #spam