The owner of a small interior-design studio keeps a whiteboard of current projects. There’s the new brochure, the online shop, the supplier review, the staff handbook, a partnership with a furniture maker, a podcast idea, a pricing overhaul, a new filing system and a showroom refresh. Each one is moving. None of them is finished.
She works long hours and is genuinely busy. At the end of every week, she’s made progress on almost everything. The trouble is that a project that’s 60% done delivers almost none of its value. A half-written handbook doesn’t help new staff. A nearly launched online shop sells nothing.
Most small businesses have far more good ideas than time, and the natural response is to start several at once to keep things moving. It feels efficient. Research on how attention works suggests it may be one of the most expensive habits a business can have.
One Like insight: Starting things feels like progress. Finishing them is where the value is.
Attention residue
In 2009, Sophie Leroy, now a professor of management at the University of Washington Bothell, published a study with a title many business owners could have written themselves: “Why is it so hard to do my work?” In two experiments, she asked people to work on one task and then switch to another, such as moving from a word puzzle to evaluating a job candidate’s CV.
She found that people struggle to stop thinking about a task they’ve left unfinished, and that their performance on the next task suffers as a result. She called this lingering distraction attention residue. Part of the mind stays with the first task, so the second one gets less than full attention.
There was a twist. Simply finishing the first task wasn’t always enough to let people move on cleanly. Those who completed it under a tight time limit showed the least residue and felt most confident they’d really finished, perhaps because a deadline gave them a clear sense of closure. Those who finished at their own pace still kept thinking about how they’d done.
These were laboratory studies with students, and real workdays are messier. But the core finding matches everyday experience. Every unfinished project quietly takes up a little mental space. With nine of them open, the owner is never fully focused on any one.
Fewer projects, finished sooner
There’s also a simple arithmetic reason to limit how many projects run at once. Imagine three projects, each needing three weeks of focused work. Work on them in turn and the first is finished and delivering value after three weeks, the second after six, the third after nine. Spread your time across all three at once and, even with no switching cost at all, none is finished until around week nine. Add the attention residue from constant switching and all three may finish even later.
This is why many project-management approaches, from manufacturing to software, encourage teams to limit their “work in progress”: to agree a maximum number of things that can be on the go at any time, and to finish something before starting something new. For a small business, that might mean no more than two or three improvement projects at once, with everything else waiting on a visible “next” list.
Leroy’s research suggests two further habits. When you have to stop a task part-way through, write down exactly where you left off and what comes next, so your mind can let go of it. And give yourself clear, short deadlines for finishing pieces of work, which seem to help people close the loop and move on.
[Infographic placement] Juggling versus finishing. Two timelines over nine weeks for three projects (A, B, C). Top, juggling: stripes of A, B and C alternating every few days; all three finish around week nine or later, with a small “switching cost” label. Bottom, finishing: a solid block of A (weeks 1–3, value starts), then B (weeks 4–6, value starts), then C (weeks 7–9). Caption: Same total work. Value arrives much sooner when you finish one thing at a time.
Choosing what to finish first
If you recognise the nine-project whiteboard, try a short exercise. List everything currently in progress. For each one, estimate how much work is left and what value it will deliver once it’s done. Then pick the two or three that combine the most value with the least remaining effort, finish those, and deliberately pause the rest. Pausing a project isn’t abandoning it. It’s choosing an order.
It can feel uncomfortable to put good ideas on hold, especially when other people are excited about them. A visible “next up” list helps, because everyone can see that the paused projects haven’t been forgotten, only queued.
A few questions can help:
- How many projects do we have on the go right now, honestly?
- Which ones are closest to delivering value if we finished them?
- What’s the maximum number we should have open at any one time?
- When we stop something part-way, do we write down where we left off?
Which brings us back to the interior-design studio and its whiteboard of nine. If the owner chose three and finished them over the next six weeks, she’d have a new brochure, a working online shop and a clear pricing structure doing real work for the business. The other six would still be waiting. But for the first time in months, some of her hard work would be finished, and she’d start the next project with a clearer head.
Sources
- Sophie Leroy, “Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks”, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 109(2), 2009. Summarised by the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest, 29 July 2009.
