“Every time you switch your attention from one task to another, you’re basically asking your brain to switch all of these cognitive resources,” Leroy explained to me when I asked her about this work. “Unfortunately, we aren’t very good at doing this.” She summarizes the current context in which 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 other words, Leroy identified a clear answer to the question that titles her
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