Why switching tasks is more expensive than it feels

The cost of an interruption was never the interruption itself. It was the reconstruction afterward: reloading context, remembering where a half-finished thought was headed, and re-establishing the state of mind that made progress possible in the first place.

Notification systems are tuned to feel free because each one is small. Stacked across a working day, though, they behave less like sand and more like a tax withheld before any real work happens.

The fix people reach for first — turning notifications off entirely — usually fails within a week. What actually holds up is batching: deciding in advance when interruptions are allowed, rather than negotiating with each one as it arrives.