Browse all articles on productivity, focus, and deliberate practice.
Attention residue is the cognitive state where an incomplete task continues competing for your attention after you've nominally switched to something else. It explains why task-switching costs far more than the interruption itself.
Paul Graham's 2009 essay identified two incompatible ways of structuring time. Fifteen years later, the collision between them explains most of the productivity problems in modern knowledge work.
Body doubling means working in the presence of another person to improve focus and task completion. For ADHD brains, the effect is dramatic and backed by decades of social facilitation research.
Task batching groups similar tasks together and completes them in a single focused block. It works because every task switch costs far more than most people think.
The Eisenhower Matrix sorts every task into four quadrants by urgency and importance. The real insight is not what to do first. It is how much time you are spending on tasks that feel urgent but build nothing.
Parkinson's Law states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. The corollary is equally useful: compress the time and the work compresses with it.
