We don’t have good notions of productivity. Traditional economic productivity largely requires people working toward a singular measurable output with a transparent process. You have this input-to-output ratio and a process generating it, and you can tweak that and see what it does to the ratio. None of that works in knowledge work. So we fell bac

Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen bluntly summarize in their 2016 book, The Distracted Mind:

The main problem with massive multitaskers, according to a Stanford University study from 2009, is that they’re terrible at filtering out the stuff that doesn’t matter.

The key is to find ways to minimize context shifts and overload while still getting done what needs to get done.