The attention cost of switching apps to write something down

Writing down a task should take a few seconds. In practice, on most PCs, it means leaving what you are doing: find the right app, find the right list, type, set a date, and come back. Each of those steps is small. Together they are a context switch, and context switches are expensive in a way that is easy to underestimate.

What the research says about switching

Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, has studied how people move between screens and tasks since the early 2000s, and summarised the work in her book Attention Span; her site gloriamark.com lists the research. Widely reported findings from that body of work include:

• Average attention on a single screen has fallen from around two and a half minutes in 2004 to well under a minute in more recent studies.
• After an interruption, people often take a long time, measured in many minutes, to return to the original task, frequently passing through other tasks on the way.
• A large share of switches are self-initiated rather than caused by someone else.

The exact numbers vary by study and setting, and they should not be quoted as laws. The direction is consistent: switching is frequent, and getting back is slow.

Why capture speed is a focus question

That last finding is the one that matters for task apps. “I should write that down” is a self-initiated switch. If writing it down takes you into another app, you are now in a different context, with different things on screen, and the path back to your original work runs past everything else in that app.

The fix is not discipline. It is reducing what the switch costs:

• Do not change windows. A capture box that opens over the current app and closes back into it keeps the original context on screen.
• Do not make decisions. Picking a list, a project and a date are each small decisions. Typing them as part of one line avoids the forms.
• Return focus automatically. If you have to click back into your work, you have switched twice.

This is the design argument behind Jot, described in more detail in giving the focus back and the hundred millisecond budget.

Batch the processing, not the capture

The other half of the answer is when you deal with what you captured. Capture should happen in the moment, because the thought is fragile. Processing (sorting, scheduling, doing) should happen in batches, at times you choose. That keeps the interruption small and the follow-through reliable. The pairing is laid out in the two-minute rule and quick capture.

A fair caveat

No tool makes interruptions free. A capture key still takes a moment of attention, and some thoughts are better ignored than recorded. The goal is not to capture everything. It is to make capturing cheap enough that you do it when it matters, instead of telling yourself you will remember.

Jot is on the Microsoft Store.

Jot is a quick-capture app for Windows: one hotkey, one line, back to what you were doing. What it is, or what is still unproven.