Attention Residue: The Hidden Tax of Context-Switching

(upbeat music) Welcome to The Proctivity Show, podcasts where we believe that people like you can get the important things done without sacrificing your health, family, and things that matter to you. If it's your first time listening, welcome to The Show, I'm Tan Fam, founder of Asian Efficiency, and coming all the way from Austin, Texas is myself, but my co-host, Brooks Duncan, is coming all the way from Vancouver, Canada. How are you today, Brooks? I'm great, though, Premier League's going on, Champions League's going on, FA Cup's going on, league cup's going on, it's just full of distractions and things to pull my attention away. So hopefully I can get through this podcast. This is what going on every single spring. I feel like when you live in Austin, spring is like a hot bed of just so much going on. And then same thing in the fall, it's the two times of the year when you kind of have to learn how to master your energy and then also your attention of what you're going to be doing, which by the way, is today's topic as well. We're going to be talking about how you can master your attention and talk about this concept of attention residue. But before we dive into the content, we always like to start off with our top three favorite resources. So Brooks, I have three of them here today. First one is a tip that I forget that people don't notice, but until I sit next to somebody and they see my screen and they go, "Hey, how do you do this?" That's why I realized, "Oh yeah, this is like a relatively new feature that exists in Google Chrome." So if you are a Google Chrome user, one of my favorite features is if you go to one of your tabs, you right click on it, there's a thing that says Split View. Now if you click on that, what it will do is it will actually split your window in two halves, left and right, and then you'll see one side will have the screen that you were on previously. And then on the other side, you can push in another tab that you have open. So instead of having two windows open next to each other, like two crumbs, you can actually have this Split View. And so for example, as we are recording this podcast, I'm split viewing my Chrome, where on the left side I'm looking at Brooks, and then on the right-hand side, I have like a rough outline of ideas that we're gonna be talking about today. So this has been a really easy way to avoid context switching, where I'm just going back and forth between different windows, and relevant to today's episode. So I wanna make sure I share that with everybody. The second thing unrelated is a app or tool, if you may, we'll call TailSkill. So something I've been doing more of is, I have all these computers at home, and sometimes I wanna log in remotely onto my computer, like screen sharing, or remote login. And I was looking into, figuring out ways to make this more secure, and then people were telling me about TailSkill. So TailSkill essentially allows you to set up a private VPN. And so what you have to do is, you set up an account on TailSkill, and then you set up all your computers on that network. And the beautiful thing is, even though they're all connected to the internet, people cannot connect to any of those computers, unless they're all signed in on your TailSkill account. So you have to install the app, TailSkill, on every single computer, and as long as they're logged in, and they're added to the network as well, people can then, or computers can then talk to each other, and you can then remotely log in. So it's a really safe way to build this like, private network for yourself, and making it easier for you to log in remotely as well. So that is it, TailSkill. And then the third one is a desktop speaker by Dell. It's the Model SP3022. It's basically like this really slim looking sound bar. And the differentiating feature is that, it actually connects with Teams and Zoom natively. So when you're joining a Teams meeting or Zoom meeting, you can just click the button on the speaker, and it will actually turn it on the meeting, or you can mute yourself on the meeting, or turn it off. And so it's natively integrated, which I don't really use for that reason. I thought it was a nice feature. I just like the design of it, and the speaker quality is okay. I don't need any world-class music playing while I'm working behind my computer. That's what my Sonos system is for. I'll connect it to Sonos every now and then, if I really want to amp it up a little bit. But for the most part, day to day, I just need some background tunes every now and then, and this is a good speaker I've been using. Yeah, TailSkill is interesting. It's like you think about the way we would all use to have to solve the problem is you would do some research online, you'd have to open ports in your router, you'd have to like turn on or set up SSH on your computer. But if you don't really know what you're doing, it's very easy to make your whole thing very insecure. And I love that when there's a solution like TailSkill, but I just completely solves the problem that we maybe didn't even know that we had. So great show. Yeah, I highly recommend people check it out. We'll link to it here in the show notes or just swipe in the app, you'll see it there as well. We're just going to the progeteofdshore.com. You'll find show notes there, and other things we have on the site. All right, Brooks, let's talk about attention. Now, we're mostly known for the T framework here at AE, time, energy, and attention. It's kind of our signature method when it comes to productivity. And I came across this concept called attention residue, which if people aren't familiar, it's the simple idea that anytime you're focusing on a particular task or you're focusing on something intensely, and all of a sudden, something else is grabbing your attention and you mentally switch to the other thing, there's still a little bit of that residue left remaining in your brain, hence what I call it attention residue, where it's still nagging and pulling you in from the first task that you were focused on. So another way of saying this is when you're focusing on something and all of a sudden you get distracted, there's a bit of an open loop that's going on in your brain that still has to be closed. And the people who are the most focused and also typically are the most productive, I find are those who do a really good job of mastering their attention, where they try to minimize the number of open loops that have in their brain or the attention residue that's been piling up. And it's one of the reasons why, for example, I never have more than four, five, six, maybe at most browser tabs open, because every browser tab to me is a representation of attention residue. Yeah, it's like, you know, you're at work and it's Friday afternoon and somebody comes up to you and be like, hey, can we talk on Monday? And then you go off to your weekend and guess what you're thinking about the entire weekend is whatever the heck this Monday talk is going to be about. And this is kind of like that. Like we always think of attention issues as being things popping up and distracting us, which they are, of course, it's the thing that's popping up that's distracting us, but we forget about the leftovers from the thing that we were just working on before that pop up that can bleed into it. So yeah, attention residue is like something that doesn't really get talked about as much, but I think it's one of those things, like you said, with browser tabs, it kind of builds up, builds up, builds up, and it has a knock-on effect going forward to whatever you're trying to do. Even if the thing that you have switched to is more important, there's still that drag from the thing before if you don't properly close it off. First of all, do you know what a context window is in a sense of AI in a self-like style? I'm learning it. I think it's what the, well, you correct me if I'm wrong, it's what the AI knows about. So by which I mean everything that, like, let's say you have things set up, and the AI knows about you, it knows about the problem, it knows about your apps, but if something is not in the context window, then it just doesn't know about it. So you might be thinking, "Hey, why isn't the AI doing what I expect?" And it might be because it doesn't know about the thing that you think it should know about. Is that kind of right? Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate. And the reason I bring this up is, as we're talking about attention residue, we actually get to control when we're using AI tools, what is typically in the context window, right? So when we're starting a task with, for example, a chat, G-B-T, whether we realize there are not, it actually fills up your context window already with, for example, it knows your name, it knows where you live, it knows some of your preferences. And so when you're chatting with chat G-B-T, it already knows those little details, and that's why it seems like it's pretty smart and personalized, right? Now, once you start using other AI tools, oftentimes they don't have any context about you, and so you have to provide that context to them to say, "Hey, my name is Tan, I live in Austin, based on this information, how would you then personalize this proposal or personalize this email or do something else?" Right, so the art of being really good with AI is managing context windows. Now, what a lot of people don't know is the context window is finite, meaning the way I typically teaches is, if you imagine a sheet of paper and I prompt something, then I fill up that sheet of paper. When the AI responds back to me, it also fills up that sheet of paper. So when we go back and forth, we're ending up filling up that whole sheet of paper, and the AI is really good at remembering everything that if it all fits on a sheet of paper, it will know word for word, what's there? But as soon as you get beyond the length of the sheet of paper, it starts to scan stuff because it just cannot hold enough memory to literally memorize everything. So now it starts to skim, it starts to scan, and then the longer you go, the more it starts to forget stuff. And. If you've ever had a really long conversation with Chad or Claude, you might have had this experience where it starts to forget stuff or starts to misrefer and stuff because your window is so long now that it doesn't know word for word what you're actually referring to. It's kind of guessing at this point. And so if you ever had like a really long thread with Chad and all of a sudden you go, why is it hallucinating? Why is it misreferencing stuff? It's because you essentially blew up the whole context window. Now, why do I bring this up? Well, first of all, if you're using AI, this is really helpful to know. If you want to get really good performance out of it. So you have to get the best out of AI by managing the context window. So if you know that the sheet of paper is all it can handle to be really accurate, you are very, really mindful about how long you will go before starts kind of like misreferencing stuff. And our brain in a way is kind of similar in the sense that if we build up all this attention residue, like our context window, our memory starts to get loaded. And once we overload it, we start to kind of like degrade and performance. And then we see this all the time with AI every day. When soon as we blow up the context window, the performance just degrades. The code is worse. It starts misreferencing stuff. It starts forgetting stuff. If you ever use up to like open claw, you're like, oh my gosh, why? So forgetting now, the memory is terrible. It's because the context window is just too big. And the same thing works with our brain. If we have so much stuff loaded in our brain, we don't have enough RAM or space for focusing on other things. And so this attention residue is a powerful concept to understand in sense that we actually get to control how much of that is going on on our daily basis, whether it's the browser tabs that we have open, the commitments we make on a daily basis, the amount of tasks we say we will do that day versus what we can actually accomplish. And so this whole idea of like loading up the context window for our brain is something I think about quite often because I'm most trying to minimize that as much as possible. Yeah, as you're talking about that, I was thinking about I think newer computer users or maybe the younger folks might not remember this as much now that computers have so much memory and have SSDs. So everything is just much faster. But if you think years ago, when you use the computer, they didn't have as much memory. You'd be trying to do something. Maybe you're working out a big spreadsheet or something like that, but your computer wouldn't have that much memory. So it would be writing to your hard drive with a swap file. And so once it was getting more and more overloaded, it's like always having to go to your to it swap file to like save things and retrieve things, which back in the day of old style hard drives, sometimes it would just be grinding and it would be slowing down and you would be like, Hey, I want to go on to this thing that I'm working on. But your computer is like, Hey, no, sorry, man, you know, I'm still dealing with that last thing that that I'm trying to save or retrieve. And I think it's the same way. And again, the, the usual problem about distractions is, Hey, we need to like cut down on notifications, you know, all that sort of stuff to stop distractions. I don't, which obviously is, is helpful and good. But I don't think it's as much about dealing with the distractions coming in as making sure that you are making clean handoffs between the things that you were doing and, and want to start doing. And that is where the opportunity for dealing with this residue, I think. Okay. So we're dating ourselves a little bit with all these references. So if you're newer to the show, you can probably tell how old we are. It's a reference because if you have no clue what we're talking about, you're probably younger than we are. And if you know what we're talking about, you know exactly what age category we belong in. And to take it a separate or Brooks, as you were saying, this is the first thing that came to my mind is defragging. Do you remember those days? I almost said, and then we were defragging our hard drive, but I thought, oh, that would be just too much. But yes, I do remember. So for those who remember those days or don't, if you use the Windows computer, there was this best practice where you had to, I think the technical term was actually defragmentation. And it's a simple idea. It was like when you were running this app, you would see these blocks on your screen of different colors. And you can kind of tell like your memory was all over the place. Maybe like teal color, red, yellow, and ideally, instead of having them be like a splatter of colors, they're kind of like lined up and organized. So that your computer would be more efficient and your memory would be faster. And attention residue in a funny way is kind of like that. When you are working throughout the day and you're just piling up old is like residue of like open loops, things that are half done, things you have to get back to, things that you promise you would do. You start to get these like different colors on the spectrum of a square or a rectangle. And instead of them being nicely organized, they're all over the place. And it's kind of slowing down your performance in that sense. So the whole defragging thing, I mean, just going back to the, you know, the 90s computer references is I think is so true for how we get worked on today. Ideally, it's all green and it's all lined up and it's all organized. You go from one task to the other. Now life is imperfect. And we all deal with things that we just have to do on a daily basis in an imperfect manner. And that's okay. However, one way we can minimize some of this residue is if you do get the distracted or you have to switch gears or for whatever reason we were working on something and we didn't get it done. One of the best things I find for myself is if I have to switch gears right down that I can't finish this task and write down what my next step would be. So if I know like, hey, somebody's pulling in for a meeting or I need to do something else, if I'm in the middle of a task, I would lose your right down. Hey, here's what I'm thinking right now. And here's what I think would be the next step where here's what I think is left remaining to do. And this is something that I used to be kind of manual, but it's still very effective. But now with whisper flow, because I use voice for the most part and rarely type. And anytime I get pulled in, I'm like, okay, let me whisper flow this real quick. And I go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, speaking to it. And it will just kind of dictate very quickly. And then I'll go, okay, let me move on to this meeting or whatever else I got to do. And so now I have the satisfaction knowing that, okay, if I'm done with this meeting, I don't have this open loop in my head that I have to get back to it and think about what the next steps would be because I already documented it. Yeah, it's always amazing to me. If you think about the book getting things done and by David Allen and, you know, it came out, it came out way before any of this like social media, instant messaging, email pretty much, you know, all of these modern things that are just like destroying our attention. Like that book came out before all of that stuff. But it's amazing how some of the fundamental concepts still apply. Like I think your defragmenting example is such a great one because at the end of the day, one of the biggest ways to combat attention residue is to have what he calls a trusted system. So to have a place that you know that when somebody DMs you and said, Hey, can you, can you help me set something up in our content management system? Or, Hey, can you check out this spreadsheet or if you've got instead of having, you know, a word doc off to the, to the side of your monitor that you're going to get back to you later, if you have it all captured in a trusted system, whatever that system is, that works for you. Could be a piece of paper. It could be a task manager or a calendar or whatever it is. But the idea is if you have a place that you trust that to your point is like easy to get things into them. Not like you said, deep, deep frags everything because then you're not all over the place. You've got things in that system. And then you've got a source of truth that you can go to and look. So sometimes the classic advice is classic for a reason, I think. I don't know about you, but I like keeping my money where I can see it. Unfortunately, traditional big wireless carriers also seem to like keeping my money too. 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And thousands of growing businesses already trust Upwork to hire flexible, high-quality freelance talent for everything from one-off projects to ongoing support. Visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That is Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's UPWORK.com. Upwork.com. Yeah, is there anything else that you find is helpful in your daily routine of minimizing attention residue or if you do get pulled in for a meeting or your son comes in right now and says, "Hey, bad. I need you for this and that." In the middle of doing something, what's your go-to move or what's your procedure or what are some of the routines you have around this? Well, actually, what I do is very similar to what you described earlier, which is, and this is something I started doing maybe in the last year or so, maybe a little more, is whatever system I'm working with, whether it's my personal task manager, whether it's Jira, in the more team base or whatever, I will always record what I did, but I always, always put next colon and then the next thing to do, like kind of what you said. But I find that just doing that, 99.9% of the time I'm going to, it's not like I need it to remember what the next thing is. Like, if I sit down to a task, chances are I know what I need to do. But it's just the act, the physical act of getting it out of your brain into the system, that clears it, it's like magic. It kind of clears it out of my mind. The other thing that I like to do is, if let's say that an instant message comes in through Teams or Slack or whatever, when I'm not at my computer, I make it a point whenever possible to capture that into drafts or something like it, just so that is not, it's available to me and it doesn't like disappear in the ether of direct messages. I always capture it out of somewhere. And a lot of times you can set up automations to do that, which I've done as well. But the idea is not to leave things in email inbox or a DM or something like that. Like, I have a, my email program, I have it set so that if I have something actionable, you know, I have a keyboard shortcut that will send it off to my task manager. Those type of things, I just want to get things out of inboxes into a trusted system. That's my main thing. Oh, man, the email, I think is one of the biggest culprits for attention residue because how often do people, including myself sometimes, we read an email and go, yeah, I don't know what I need to do right now, but I know I need to take action, but I can't do it in this moment. So let me just market as unread and then get back to it again later. And I think for one email, that's totally fine. But imagine doing that for like 10 emails that you get in a day. And that to me is just like attention residue piling up right there, where it's unresolved. You still have to make a decision. And as you always like to say, clutter is a representation of unresolved decisions or decisions. You just have a major and to me, when you open up an email and you market as unread again, then that is in itself not bad. But when you do it multiple times in a row, that's where things kind of like work against you. And so I'm a big proponent of the whole idea of touching it once, where hey, if I'm reading an email, let's decide in that moment what to do with it. Even if I don't know exactly what to do with it, it forces me to think through in that moment what to do with it. And this is a bit of a muscle you have to develop at first because it's so easy to just go, oh, let me just mark it unread and go back to it later and then move on to the next email. But that's actually not doing work. That's just honestly being mentally lazy and just trying to find something to do that you think is most urgent or whatever makes you feel like you're emotion and productive or as we like to call it fake work. When in fact, the real work we have to do is oftentimes to uncomfortable stuff. The stuff that we tend to procrastinate on, it's the stuff that we know we really should be doing. It's a little harder to do typically as well. But when we do do it, we feel really good at the end. And those are often times the hardest things to kind of kick off. And for me, to your point, if we can remove friction from, okay, I'm reading an email to storing it, say, in your to-do list app or your task manager or putting it on the list somewhere, that way, at least you know that you're processed it, even though you might not actually know what the next step is so that you can move on to the next email. And a bigger idea here is that when you process all your emails, once it's all processed, some of you reply to some of them, you actually have to take action on. And then it's also marked as red, is that now that you have a list of things that need to be done, guess what? Now you can actually prioritize what needs to be done first, what second, what third, or what needs to be done tomorrow versus doing it one email at the time because that's when you start to work in this like mode of urgency rather than strategically saying, Hey, what are the most important things that I have to focus on right now? What are the goals of the company or the team or an organization? And how do I line what just arrived in my inbox with how this much as possible and everything else around it? Yeah, you know, you talk about fake work and mess the problem, right? Sitting there in Slack or teams and responding to messages and sending people that spreadsheet link that they ask for like all that type of stuff, it just feels so productive, right? You know, you're responsive, you're banging things out, it just feels so productive, but it doesn't help. It doesn't help you necessarily with the things that are really important to you. It might be important to those other people, but might not be as important to you. The other thing that I do to combat this attention residue is I'm very strategic with the times that I allow certain notifications. So I have all my notification settings like some things I need to have notifications for, but I try to be really cognizant of when they're turned on and off on the schedule. And the reason I started doing that is because it's probably been 15 years since I've worked with somebody in my own timezone. It's just the way it's always worked. I've worked with global colleagues and never in my own Pacific time zone. And what I found is that let's say I wake up or I'm at the gym in the morning or whatever and a message comes in. And even if I'm even if I'm like, good, and I'm like, no, I'm not going to deal with this now. I'll deal with this when I get into get to my desk. Even if I know I'm not going to do anything with it for hours, it's not like I'm jumping to my computer, but just seeing that that message there, seeing the question that somebody asked, you know, it just the attention just drags you. So I've started making it so that I don't get notification till a certain time in the morning. And then I don't get notifications after a certain time at night. And that's really helped me with my attention residue because I am somebody who, as you know, I am somebody who is natural of people, please, or I take pride in my responsiveness and problem solving ability. But those qualities are great for a lot of things, but not great for combating attention residue. So it's better to save myself from myself and have those notification schedules turned on. I think this is also a very important area that is underrated, which is how we can not just shape, but also design our environments to help us what we want to accomplish. And I know James Kleror talks about this a little bit in his book, Atomic Habits. But the other example I would like to use is if you ever try to sleep in an airport, you know how terrible that experience is, right? The seats are uncomfortable. There's an announcement every few minutes. There's people in your vicinity talking, chatting, walking. It's just not a great place to sleep. Now, if you compare that to sitting in a library where it's quiet, everyone is working on their own thing. Not that many people are walking around. There's not that much foot traffic. There's no announcements every few minutes. It's so much easier to sleep in that environment or to take a nap versus doing that at the airport. And so even though the activity might be the same, one environment is more suited for the activity than the other one is or it's least making it easier to do so. And that idea also applies to how we get worked on at home or how we get worked on at the office. Because if we have a cluttered desk, that's kind of like trying to take a nap at the airport. It can kind of be done, but it's not ideal. It's not really helping you. Whereas if If you come home and your house is clean, your desk is clean and everything is just pristine, that's kind of like trying to take a nap at a library. It's okay, maybe not the perfect place because we rather need a bed and something more comfortable, but at least the environment is conducive enough that you can actually do it and it doesn't work against you. So I'm always trying to think about how can I shape my environment to make sure that the action I want to happen is a lot easier. And a clean workspace is one, making your bed every morning is another one being around the right people is another one that I think is underrated. So there's all these things that we can do to shape our environment and if there's only one thing you take away from this like environment piece is that just be aware when you look at your desk right now or as you're listening to this podcast, look around your space right now. Is it organized? Is it in an orderly fashion? If it is, you'll probably notice you'll be a little bit more organized and focused. But if it's bit of a hot mess, that's an opportunity to increase your focus and minimize the attention residue in your life because once you start clearing it, you'll start to feel immediate release as well. Yeah, I think another type of environment too is how you structure your day, kind of like your time management environment. I think that can have a big impact as well. And there's no one right way to do it like different ways work best for all of us. I mean, some people like the kind of like super, I can't remember the term that people use, but like the super scheduling where I like every minute of your day is blocked out. Some people like more general time blocks and some people like having more outcome based time. And I think we're all kind of like go on a different spectrum. I find personally, I like having outcome based. So I think to myself, this is what I want to get done in the day. I actually, I've talked about this on the podcast before, but I actually tend to split it into I have like a morning goal and an afternoon goal. And I find having that is very helpful because once I kind of like say to myself, hey, this morning, my outcome is to be working on this certain thing. Then once that morning is done, I know that I'm going to be able to do it. But I've reached that outcome. And so I'm fine walking away to go to something else. So that's what kind of works for me. How do you shape your kind of like time environment for your battling attention residue? I mean, for me, it's kind of similar in the sense that I try to do my most productive work in the morning when I have the most influence and control about my day. And then the rest of the day is a little bit more flexible because I can have meetings. I might be in transition, going from one place to another. And I'm okay with that because I know it's not as predictable and that's fine with me. But then also I like to have buffers in my day as much as possible. I find that if I have back to back to back to back stuff, I'm never as focused because if I'm on a back to back meeting, then as soon as that meeting ends and I move on to the next one, a part of me is like, oh my gosh, there's still a bunch of things I need to do before I feel like I'm ready for the next meeting, whether it's closing the last meeting, you know, writing a follow-up email to making a bunch of notes or just informing somebody of what happens so that they get unlocked. Like there's a bunch of things that always have to happen after a meeting. And if I'm on back to back to backs, like I'm feeling like I'm building this attention residue of, oh, like there's a few things I need to write down real quick or whisper flow real quick to feel confident that I can be fully present in the next meeting. And it's more of a new ones feeling or experience, I think, from just one teaching this stuff, but also two is looking at my own self awareness and performance. Whereas if I had a 10 minute buffer between every single meeting, I have enough time to, for example, use the bathroom and go outside, take a break, write down some notes, bang out a quick follow-up email or whatever else needs to be done so that I can be fully present into the next meeting or even just reading the meeting brief before I'm even, you know, showing up to the meeting. So I know who I'm talking to, why we're talking, what's going on, how I can make the most out of this meeting. And when we have these back to backs, that just never happens. And I feel like that attention residue just piles up. And then typically what happens is at the end of the day, after a long back to back session or a bunch of them, the last thing I want to do is do all this like little bit of admin work, right? And then that kind of like translates over to the next day and then I don't maybe plan as well in the morning because I'm still dealing with this stuff from yesterday. And so this buffer time at the day is super valuable. And I try to follow it as much as I can. Those 15 minutes of buffer time, you just go, hey, what did I do today? What's left for the meeting? How do I translate this into action steps tomorrow? Like ever since I started using whisper flow and I just kind of verbally dump it and not to get too crazy, but basically verbally dump it and slack and give it to my agents to go, hey, here's my verbal dump, help me organize my thoughts here. That's actually very helpful where this agent can just kind of go, okay, I got it. You know, I looked at your calendar, here's all the things, let me organize your thoughts and boom. It's like nicely presented back to me and then I go, okay, great, it's out of my head. I feel good about it. And then I can kind of close off the day knowing that old is a potential residue. It's been kind of addressed and sweeps. And that feels a lot better. Man, when's the whisper flow going to start supporting the podcast? We give them so much free advertisement. These guys got out of that. These guys got to get in touch, man. I know. They have a pretty nice referral program where if you refer somebody, they'll give you a free month, so they won't pay you, but they'll give you a free month because I'm on a pay plan. And I've referred it so much, not just through Asian efficiency, but just like stuff outside that I basically don't pay anymore. Just get like a free month subscription every single month. Speaking of the end of the day, though, I find one thing and, you know, none of us, I do have to say, none of us are perfect at this stuff, right? We all, we all, we're all just learning and trying to improve on all of this stuff at the same time. And one thing that I find really helpful at the end of the day is, especially, you know, some days you end the day and you're just like crushed it, right? I did everything I, everything I wanted to do. I've got no like open loops, no attention residue, like I nailed it, right? So that does happen at the end of the day sometimes, but also sometimes it's like, you get to the end of the day. Maybe you have commitments you have to go to or something like that. And you're just like, ah, I didn't quite finish what I set out to finish. And it can be annoying and frustrating, but I find what's helpful in that case is to just like, and I can see your workflow for like whisper flow and, you know, dumping it and getting it analyzed. I think that's a great way to do it. But just like to take a step back and just be like, okay, I didn't get to the end of the day, completing what I wanted to. Why? And it could be it's just like too big to finish in a day, which is totally legit, but it could also be it's a good opportunity to think, ah, if I hadn't have done X, if I hadn't of like taking that detour to answer these questions, if I hadn't, you know, read about what the latest is happening in so and so, you know, if I hadn't wasted time doing this, it's really helpful to look back at why you didn't get to the end of the day and just like make a mental mode or get it into your review system or whatever so that you can learn and go forward. But I find that act of looking back and just acknowledging what did or did not go wrong. I think that helps with the open loops and the attention residue as well, because then you're not mentally dragging on the fact that you have this thing more to do. As long as like you say you capture it for your next action items, I think that's a good way to close the book and move on to the next day. I love it. Well, if you made it all the way to the end of this episode, you are awesome. We always like to end things with an action. So my recommendation for you here today is before you close the end of the work day today, I want you to write down what is something that is unresolved of today? What is something that you still are maybe thinking about in the back of your head and I just want you to put it pen to paper or put it in your to-do list app or you know taking up or maybe if you have whisper flow, talk into it and have it verbalized what is going on in your head. And I think if you make this habitual for the next few days, every time you finish your day, just verbalize or write down what's going on in your head that is unresolved. I think you'll find a lot of closure, not only that, but also you'll find it easier to then move on to the next thing and making sure that you're planning moving forward for the next day or the next session is going to be a lot easier. So give that a go, let us know how it goes. Thank you so much for listening to the Procivity Show and we'll see you again next week.