Executive Summary
Interruptions are a fact of organizational life and endlessly fragment our time and thus our attention. Our brains find it difficult to switch attention between tasks; more often than not, part of our attention stays focused on the interrupted task and does not fully switch to the interrupting demand — a term coined attention residue. Consequently, we perform interrupting tasks with only part of our cognitive resources and risk performing them poorly. So what can we do about it? Research shows that a simple intervention known as a “Ready-to-Resume”…
