This is a place for displaying some concepts of the Sherpa System.
Please click here for the official Sherpa website.
Attention Residue: The Hidden Hijacker
When we change tasks, part of our attention stays focused on the interrupted task and does not switch to the interrupting demand. Dr. Sofie Leroy of the University of Washington Bothell School of Business coined a name for this phenomenon: attention residue.
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FACTS:
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Attention residue costs US businesses an estimated $1 trillion per year.
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Some studies estimate that the average c-suite executive receives 10 to 15 interruptions per day.
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A 1-minute interruption costs an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds in lost productivity.
Attention residue occurs when you switch between two cognitively demanding tasks. This isn’t a case of talking on the phone while you’re doing laundry. Instead, imagine you’re working on a presentation and you’re interrupted by a text. After you look, it takes time to get back into the groove. That’s attention residue.
Attention residue puts a major burden on the US economy. Studies show that c-suite executives are interrupted between 10 and 15 times a day. That’s a lot of very expensive time being wasted. In fact, the US economy loses an estimated $1 trillion per year to attention residue. Email, text, instant messaging, etc. accounts for $588 billion of that cost. That is over 50%.
That said, there’s no realistic way to prevent all interruptions. Even if you could, you wouldn’t want to. Sometimes executives have to switch tasks and address an urgent issue! Instead, the Sherpa System is designed to provide an off-ramp from distractions. With a Ready-to-Resume Plan, you’ll be able to manage attention residue and get back into a flow state as quickly as possible.
SOLUTIONS:
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Batch related tasks to avoid context-switching.
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Reduce interruptions as much as possible so you can mono-task.
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Use your Ready-to-Resume Plan if you do get interrupted.
“Interruptions affect the quality of our information processing, the quality of our decisions and work.
They can also affect the quality of leadership.”
– Dr. Sofie Leroy
(University of Washington Bothell, School of Business)
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