Ten past five

It's ten past five on a Tuesday. You lean back from the screen and take stock.

The report for Thursday is open in one window. It's at the third paragraph of the second section, which is where it was at twenty to ten this morning. You've been back to it four times. Each time you reread the last paragraph to find your place, changed a word or two, and began a sentence. Then something arrived.

There's an email to a supplier, half written, in drafts. You stopped it to look up a figure and never went back.

There's a spreadsheet with the month's reconciliation done down to row forty of ninety. There's an expenses form with the first of three sections filled in. There are twenty-three tabs open in the browser. A sticky note on the monitor says "Ring Dave back??" in your own writing, and you can't remember what Dave wanted.

You haven't stopped all day. You ate lunch at the desk. You answered every message within minutes and joined two calls, and you helped a colleague with a formula. If someone had watched you, they'd have seen a person working hard for eight hours. But you can't name a single thing that's finished. Thursday's report is no closer, and you'll be taking the laptop home.

Home has its own version. On Saturday you started hanging the washing, broke off to reply to the school about the trip, remembered the shelf you'd meant to put up, got the drill out, and then made lunch because everyone was hungry. At four o'clock there's a basket of damp clothes, a shelf leaning against the wall with two holes drilled, and an unsent reply on your phone.

I'll use a few terms throughout. A switch is leaving one task for another before you've reached a stopping point. The pile is the set of tasks you've started and not finished. A stretch is a run of time spent on one task without a switch. The restart is the time it takes to get back into a task you left. A parking note is a line you write when you stop, saying where you got to and what the next step is. And the one thing is the single task you've chosen to work on now.

The habit has some regular features. This list is my own observation and not a research finding.

You're busy the whole time and it doesn't feel like avoidance. It feels like diligence.

Most switches happen within minutes. You rarely get twenty clear minutes on anything.

Many of the switches are your own. Nobody made you open the expenses form. You thought of it, and thinking of it was enough.

The pile grows through the day. You start more things than you finish, so by five there's more open than at nine.

And the important task suffers most. The report needs sustained thought, so it's the one that gets interrupted by everything else. The small things at least get some attention.

Try one thing before reading on. Tomorrow, keep a sheet of paper beside you. Each time you move from one task to another, make a mark. At the end of the day, count the marks. Then write down what you finished, meaning completed and sent or filed, as opposed to worked on. If the second list is long and the count is low, you may not need this book. If the count is over forty and the list is short, read on.