Deep Work and the Attention Economy

“When you looked at that email inbox for 15 seconds, you initiated a cascade of cognitive changes.” —Cal Newport, professor of computer science at Georgetown University

Professor Newport also says that even minor switching from one task to another is “productivity poison.”

Efficient multitasking is a myth – this is what science is saying.

And multitasking can have consequences—really bad ones. Here’s an example. In a setting of 257 nurses and 3,308 pediatric intensive care patients, medication errors occurred when a text or phone call came in on a nurse’s assigned institutional phone in the 10 minutes leading up to a medication administration attempt. Read more about similiar examples here.

So, what can we do about it?

I’ll try to present some solutions to you in this article. So follow me!

The dangers of multitasking

Stanford’s Clifford Nass found that heavy multitaskers were surprisingly terrible at:

• Ignoring irrelevant information,
• Keeping information organized in their heads,
• Switching between tasks effectively.

There is also growing evidence that multitasking—especially in very young children—has measurable negative effects on brain development and behavior. The study tracked 291 children from 6 months to 6 years old to examine how Screen Media Multitasking (SMM), i.e., using two or more screens simultaneously, affects behavioral development.

It appears that the more minutes children spend engaging in screen multitasking at 18 months, the worse their preschool cognition and the more behavioral problems they exhibit at ages 4 and 6.

Now, what about multitasking at work?

In 2023, Dropbox sponsored the Economist Impact report “In search of lost focus.” It seems that lost focus at work has a $1.4 trillion economic impact!

The report states that:

• 42% of workers can’t focus for even 1 hour without interruption, highlighting how rare deep work has become.
• 553 hours lost annually per knowledge worker, the equivalent of losing 3.5 months of productive time each year.
• A $21,000 cost per employee and $37,000 per manager from lost focus alone. For a 100-person company, that’s $2.8 million annually.
• Root causes: Ineffective meetings and administrative overhead drive most losses.
• The bigger picture: Despite productivity tools, work environments have become fundamentally hostile to deep work.

So, what’s next? How can we prioritize deep work in a world of devices and apps that constantly require our attention?

Source: Ștefan Cosma, Unsplashed.

Notifications never stop. Emails, texts, social updates, a colleague asking something on Slack—they all demand immediate attention. We cave to these interruptions constantly, firing off responses or indulging every random thought with a scroll through social media. Each distraction feels harmless enough, but this is actually a slow, insidious death by a thousand cuts. The real damage builds slowly, and most of us remain blind to how much our scattered attention is actually costing us, or the company that hires us.

How to deal with distractions

The author of “Deep Work: Rules For Focused Success In A Distracted World” has some solutions for us. Meet: Cal Newport from Georgetown University. I discovered him thanks to this Hidden Brain podcast episode.

Here are some key strategies he is suggesting for engaging in more deep work:

• Create physical separation

Follow the example of influential thinkers like Carl Jung, who built the Bollingen Tower “without electricity or running water” by a lakeside, or Mark Twain, who had a cabin “so far from the house that his family had to blow a horn” to get his attention. Create a specific location that’s physically separated from your normal work environment and distractions.

For example, hybrid and remote work rose during and after the pandemic. Many employees who work from home often feel distracted by domestic issues, as laundry, dishes, pets, and family members create constant interruption opportunities. Being too comfortable can reduce alertness and the intensity of focus. At work, on the other hand, employees have more focus cues that homes lack. This is why, when working remotely, it is essential to create a clear space divide and eliminate distractions.

• Eliminate “Just-checking” behaviors

Stop the five-minute glances: Newport explains that even very brief checks to email or phones can have a massive negative impact on your cognitive performance. Resist the urge to do quick email or social media checks during focused work sessions.

• Understand attention residue

Research shows that when you’re distracted briefly and return to cognitively demanding work, performance drops, and it takes a while for this attention residue to clear out. Build buffer time between different types of tasks.

• Consolidate communication

Schedule specific times for email, messages, and administrative work rather than handling them throughout the day. For example, in my company (Tidaro), some colleagues are going into “monk mode” from time to time. This means they cannot be disturbed for several hours by anyone. They discovered they get more things done like this, without the constant interruptions.

• Treat it as a skill to develop

Deep work requires practice and training, just like any other skill. Start with shorter periods of focused work and gradually extend them.

• Start small and context-specific

Practice giving full attention to whatever task is immediately in front of you. If a task is too big, break it down into chunks and start with the smaller parts of the task.

At the end of the day, deep work isn’t just about time management—it’s about cognitive fitness and treating your brain’s attention as a valuable resource that needs deliberate protection and training.

Psychologist Gloria Mark from the University of California, Irvine, author of “Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity,” has spent 20 years studying how digital devices affect our attention. Her research shows that attention spans have plummeted dramatically: from 2.5 minutes per screen in 2004 to 75 seconds in 2012, and just 47 seconds by 2016-2020.

Information workers check email an average of 77 times per day, with one person in their study checking over 400 times daily. The interruption cycle is severe: people work on projects for only 10.5 minutes before being interrupted, and it takes an average of 25.5 minutes to return to the original task. These statistics are jaw-dropping, aren’t they?

Now, she also has some practical solutions. Here they are:

• Behavior-awareness

The first step is noticing unconscious behaviors: “I learned to ask myself, why do I have this urge to go to social media? Why do I have this urge to check my email right now?” This raises “unconscious activities to a more conscious level.”

• Visualizing the end of the day

Visualize your future self at day’s end, and ask yourself, “What do I want to do at the end of the day? How do I want to feel?… I want to feel rewarded and fulfilled. And the more concrete the visualization is, the more powerful it is in keeping you in check.

• Allowing for some mindless activities

Allow brief, mindless activities with limits to relax and clear your head.

• Email batching

Check email only 2-3 times daily, or block a specific time frame for checking them (unless you work in sales, and timing is crucial).

• Pay attention to… attention rhythms

People tend to have natural focus peaks around mid-morning and again about mid-afternoon. Schedule challenging work during peaks and other tasks in between.

The Atomic Habits framework

James Clear, the author of “Atomic Habits”, speaks in his book about building healthy habits. One conclusion is that small, atomic changes compound into remarkable results over time. He created 4 laws for building deep work habits. Here they are:

1. Make it obvious: Environmental design, visual cues. Daniel Kahneman would use another good word in this case: “nudging.”
2. Make it attractive: Pair deep work with something enjoyable.
3. Make it easy: Reduce friction by starting small.
4. Make it satisfying: Track progress, celebrate completion.

James Clear has also defined 4 laws to prevent doom scrolling:

1. Make it invisible: Remove apps, use website blockers. For example, I don’t have Facebook on my phone… I’m considering doing the same with Instagram.
2. Make it unattractive: Focus on negative consequences.
3. Make it difficult: Add friction, use app timers.
4. Make it unsatisfying: Track wasted time and note any regrets.

Conclusions

Our attention crisis isn’t just about technology. We’ve internalized distraction patterns and actively maintain them even when external interruptions decrease. Recovery requires both individual strategies and organizational change to create sustainable focus in our hyperconnected world.

Speaking of focus, I want to leave you with an experiment. It seems that our brains evolved so that they ignore whatever lies outside their immediate focus, even when it stares us in the face. And the proof is the Gorilla experiment by Daniel Simons:

The conclusion of this experiment is that deep focus is not a camera recording everything—it’s a spotlight that illuminates some things while leaving others in complete darkness. This has profound implications for how we design systems, make decisions, and navigate our increasingly complex world.

This fact has many implications. Here’s one that relates to our current topic: attention is finite, and our brains can only process a limited amount of information simultaneously. Focusing intensely on one thing necessarily blinds us to others. When you are at work and focused on a task, this is a good thing. But let’s say you’re driving and paying attention to a phone call? You could miss pedestrians, cyclists, or changing traffic conditions.

This was your reminder to reclaim your focus—thanks for reading!