The Cost of a Glance

Attention does not break cleanly. It frays. When you glance at a notification mid-task, the thread you were holding does not pause politely — it unspools, and rebuilding it takes far longer than the glance itself.

I started measuring this the way I would measure a slow function: log the entry, log the exit, look at the tail. The result was uncomfortable. My average recovery time after a single interruption sat somewhere near eighteen minutes.

The fix was not willpower. It was architecture. Move the phone out of arm's reach, batch the checks, and give the day a shape that does not require constant decisions.