Ep 109. The Hidden Cost of Attention: Why You Can’t Switch Off After Work

00:00:05: Today we wanna talk about Presence and the cost of attention.

00:00:11: Now, think about it: have you ever finished your workday?

00:00:15: So you closed your laptop, probably walked into the kitchen, but you

00:00:21: still were in that last meeting.

00:00:24: So not really physically, but mentally you were still there.

00:00:28: You're probably answering emails in your head, you're replaying a conversation,

00:00:33: maybe you're planning tomorrow.

00:00:35: So your body is home, but your attention isn't.

00:00:40: It's physical, it's called attention residue.

00:00:46: So today I want to close our little series by talking about why this matters and why

00:00:53: it matters more than most people realize.

00:00:59: What is attentional residue?

00:01:04: A researcher, Sophie Leroy, in 2009, showed something very,

00:01:12: very simple but powerful.

00:01:15: When you switch between tasks,

00:01:18: part of your attention stays stuck with the previous one.

00:01:23: So your brain does not fully disengage from what you just have been doing.

00:01:31: Even when you think you moved on, there is this mental left over

00:01:37: and this mental leftover competes with what you're currently doing.

00:01:43: So it reduces your capacity to cognitively think, to cognitively process things.

00:01:50: It increases error rates and it slows you down.

00:01:55: So there are estimates that suggest that this switching between tasks,

00:02:01: the attention residue can cost up to 40% of our effective working time.

00:02:07: That's 40%.

00:02:11: And the other interesting thing is that after a switch, so when you switch

00:02:16: between tasks, it can take up to 15 to 23 minutes to regain full focus.

00:02:25: Now think about a normal workday.

00:02:30: You work, let's say, on a presentation.

00:02:34: Then there is an email notification coming up, and of course you

00:02:37: look at it because it's blinking.

00:02:39: Then you get a Team's message, then a phone call, and then back to email.

00:02:46: So your brain is always trying to focus and it's never really

00:02:52: fully focusing, fully landing on what you're currently doing.

00:02:57: You're constantly carrying open tabs.

00:03:00: It's like on your screen there are a lot of different taps and the

00:03:04: same is happening in your brain.

00:03:07: So let's look at it from a nervous system perspective.

00:03:11: I often talk about the autonomic nervous system and the parasympathetic

00:03:16: nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system, so the thrive and survive,

00:03:21: or the rest and digest as it's called usually, and the stress response.

00:03:26: And in the last episode, we spoke about orienting.

00:03:30: So this small moment in which our mind tries to figure out should I go into a

00:03:38: fight, flight, freeze response, or is this not something I need to stress about.

00:03:44: Now add this

00:03:47: additional layer: when a task remains unfinished, the brain keeps it active.

00:03:58: And this again connects directly to the so-called Zeiganik effect, which

00:04:04: says that we remember unfinished tasks better than completed ones.

00:04:11: Maybe you already experienced that.

00:04:14: An email that I finished and sent off, I often forget about it.

00:04:19: An email that is sitting in my outbox because I need to finish it up.

00:04:24: That's always on my mind.

00:04:26: So the brain really keeps an open file for what we have not yet finished.

00:04:31: And open files, what they do, is they create tension.

00:04:35: If your system is constantly holding those unfinished goals, those unfinished

00:04:43: conversations, pending decisions, something that you still need to do...

00:04:47: You will never be able to fully relax.

00:04:52: And this is why so many of my clients tell me "I cannot switch off".

00:04:59: And it's not lack of discipline.

00:05:03: It really is due to this residue.

00:05:07: Now, what is the cost for quality, because that is impacted as well.

00:05:11: So research shows that when attention residue is high, so when we do a lot of

00:05:18: things, one after the other, even more so, if the things are not finished yet, then

00:05:25: performance drops, error rate increases, and our strategic thinking declines.

00:05:34: Whereas our emotional reactivity increases of course.

00:05:40: And this is the subtle part, you might still be working.

00:05:44: You think you are really busy, but you are not fully there.

00:05:48: We could almost call this presentism at a cognitive level.

00:05:52: You are physically present, but mentally absent or at least divided.

00:06:01: Over time that that fragmentation prevents deep work, creativity,

00:06:10: and most of all real recovery.

00:06:15: And where this shows up most is in the modern office work because

00:06:26: our modern knowledge work is almost designed to create residue.

00:06:32: We get constant notifications.

00:06:34: We're expected to be on Teams, we're expected to answer to WhatsApp messages.

00:06:42: There is rapid context switching.

00:06:46: And, who hasn't gone through a day where you had back to back meetings where you

00:06:53: could not even do a bio break because there was another meeting already

00:06:56: waiting and you were almost always late, especially when you're in the office

00:07:01: and you have to move between rooms.

00:07:04: Then often, there was not even a time scheduled in to

00:07:08: move between those two rooms.

00:07:10: But not only in the office, it's difficult, but also when you work at

00:07:14: home, because then you are in this, in this hybrid work situation where

00:07:21: personal role and your professional role are more or less blending.

00:07:27: Your brain never knows exactly: are you now in a professional capacity?

00:07:32: Are you in a personal capacity?

00:07:34: You switch between the two.

00:07:36: Maybe you have your kids walking in and then you switch to your family

00:07:40: personality and then your kids walk out and you get back into the meeting and

00:07:44: you have to put your professional hat on.

00:07:48: Every change really creates this attentional residue.

00:07:54: And then we wonder why evenings feel restless.

00:07:58: Because nothing is really fully finished, fully closed.

00:08:04: And as I said already in the first episode, presence is

00:08:08: not just about being calm.

00:08:10: It's about being cognitively in the here and now, and it's as we know

00:08:18: now also about cognitive closure.

00:08:23: So making sure that if I switch to a next task that the previous task, if

00:08:28: it's not finished, at least my brain thinks it's finished enough to move on.

00:08:35: Let's look into two different little practices that you can do to help your

00:08:44: brain and help your productivity here.

00:08:48: The first practice is the so-called parking note.

00:08:52: So when you switch between tasks, then be very explicit and write one sentence: "I

00:09:01: stopped here. This is finished for now, and the next step is..." and that is all.

00:09:10: So you are giving your brain a closure.

00:09:14: It's only a temporary closure, but for your brain, it's enough.

00:09:17: And the funny thing I always tell my clients, especially when we work with

00:09:22: horses, when we work with dogs, so the trust technique, animal clients,

00:09:27: your brain does not even notice whether you have pen and paper and

00:09:30: you really write the sentence down, or you just write it in your hand.

00:09:35: Just say, "I stopped here. This is now finished for now, and the next step

00:09:41: is...", And this dramatically reduces the mental leakage into the next task.

00:09:48: You can use it before meetings.

00:09:50: You can use it to end your workday.

00:09:53: You can also use it before switching projects.

00:09:56: Takes not more than maybe 20, 30 seconds and

00:10:02: I think you will be surprised how much it changes.

00:10:07: And the second practice I wanted to share with you is the three minute reset.

00:10:13: So when you are working on a cognitively demanding task, and you wanna move on

00:10:19: to the next one, you can do something that animals do when they come off

00:10:25: a pretty stressful encountering.

00:10:28: You know what they're doing.

00:10:29: You probably have seen that a lot in dogs.

00:10:32: They shake it off.

00:10:33: And so I am not asking you to shake it off in the middle of the

00:10:37: office, although you could do that.

00:10:40: But what you can do is you can either stand up upward or remain sitting

00:10:45: and then focus on your breathing.

00:10:48: And what you can do is you can make your fists.

00:10:53: Then release them really, really slowly and it's just they

00:10:58: are opening up on their own.

00:11:00: You don't have to do anything.

00:11:03: And then you do exactly the same with your shoulders.

00:11:08: Pick your shoulders up and then let them come down by doing less and

00:11:13: less and less of the picking up.

00:11:15: So don't really let them fall down.

00:11:18: Just move them down really slowly.

00:11:21: They are moving down really slowly on their own.

00:11:25: You don't have to do anything because gravity is doing that job for you.

00:11:33: And then you can ask yourself, where is my attention right now?

00:11:42: And there is no judgment involved.

00:11:44: There is no good and bad.

00:11:45: Just notice where it is and if part of your attention is still in the

00:11:52: last task, in the last meeting, then just acknowledge it and

00:11:57: deliberately orient to the next task.

00:12:02: So this is Presence as a prevention.

00:12:06: It's not damage control.

00:12:09: But it does matter because if you go, for example, into a meeting and

00:12:16: you still have a lot of attention residue from previous..., previous

00:12:22: emails, previous conversations that you had over the day, and you have

00:12:27: a conversation in this meeting.

00:12:30: And your brain is not a hundred percent focused on the conversation

00:12:34: you're currently having.

00:12:35: There is a high chance that you miss signals that you react faster, than

00:12:42: instead of responding to others.

00:12:46: Your reactivity increases for that matter.

00:12:49: You're less tolerant, you get emotional more quickly.

00:12:54: And you probably are not fully able to listen attentively, but

00:13:00: only partially because part of your brain is just not there.

00:13:04: Part of your brain is not available.

00:13:07: So when we talk about this attention residue, it's not just

00:13:12: this productivity issue it's also a relational issue because if I have a

00:13:18: conversation and I'm not fully there.

00:13:21: The other person notices that.

00:13:23: So if I'm a leader and I have a team, and I'm not fully there

00:13:26: when I have a team meeting, they notice that.

00:13:30: And over time, this even erodes trust.

00:13:36: And for those of you who are doing the Trust Technique with your

00:13:38: animals, this is exactly what happens with your animals as well.

00:13:42: Your animals notice very well, whether you are there with them.

00:13:48: A hundred percent or not.

00:13:50: And so for them it's equally important that you finish up everything that

00:13:57: had happened before and you are there.

00:14:00: And it's not a luxury, it really is,

00:14:04: we could almost say leadership hygiene.

00:14:10: Now when we look at it from a bigger picture, of course this residue,

00:14:14: that's not something wrong because our brain always tries to do

00:14:19: something that is helpful for us.

00:14:21: So in cognitive science, the residual attention also supports

00:14:27: continuity and learning.

00:14:29: Because we can carry over from what had happened before.

00:14:34: So, the problem is not that residue exists.

00:14:38: The problem is this chronic accumulation without closure and this chronic

00:14:46: distraction that is going on.

00:14:48: The speed of notifications that we're getting.

00:14:51: And if I have too many things open, I cannot go deep.

00:14:55: Now, when we look back at Presence.

00:14:59: And you know, presence really is My focus area, because I have learned so

00:15:05: much from noticing and from learning how to get present, that I feel it's

00:15:13: really the basis for everything.

00:15:16: If I cannot get present whenever I want and whenever I

00:15:20: need to, life is pretty hard.

00:15:24: So we looked in those last four episodes into why presence is

00:15:31: a condition for living well.

00:15:33: And we have seen that it begins in the body.

00:15:38: And then we looked at this orienting moment before our

00:15:44: stress response kicks in.

00:15:48: And today we talked about attentional residue.

00:15:53: So it's important to me to emphasize that Presence is not

00:15:57: about eliminating emotions, but it's about freeing cognitive bandwidth.

00:16:04: It's about reducing the invisible load in our brain, and it's about

00:16:10: reclaiming attention so that I can put my attention where I want, consciously.

00:16:19: Because attention is your life.

00:16:24: if you wanna go deeper, there is a chance, because on February 28th, I

00:16:31: start a beta cohort for my new course.

00:16:35: "Switch Off Work".

00:16:37: It's designed especially for corporate employees and leaders

00:16:42: who struggle to mentally disengage.

00:16:45: And in those four weeks we go much deeper.

00:16:48: We talk about nervous system regulation tools, practical frameworks for

00:16:53: reducing cognitive residue, and clear transition rituals from work to home.

00:17:00: So it's not theory, it's applied training, and if you recognize

00:17:06: yourself in today's episode, this course will give you the structure and

00:17:10: tools to actually implement change.

00:17:14: Until next time, may you lead well, yourself first and then others.

00:17:21: Bye for now.