It wasn’t a hard day, just a scattered one.
And somehow that was worse.
No single task was unreasonable. Nothing broke. Nothing urgent failed. But every time I switched focus, from writing, to work, to search, to feeding, to fixing, the cost added up.
By the end of the day, I couldn’t remember what I’d done.
Just that it felt like too much and not enough at the same time.
Switching Isn’t Free
People talk about multitasking like it’s just time slicing. It’s not. There’s overhead:
- Rebuilding context
- Reopening mental state
- Retrying ideas you already had, but can’t find again
You don’t just lose time.
You lose coherence.
Interrupted Thought Feels Like Failure
You start to write something. Get pulled away. Come back and can’t see what you were trying to say.
You forget the why behind the tab you opened.
You re-read the same sentence four times and it still doesn’t land.
The task is small.
But the cost is mental fragmentation.
You Can’t Optimise Your Way Out
Trello won’t fix it.
Better tools won’t fix it.
Even time won’t fix it, because the problem isn’t time, it’s re-initialisation.
You’re not lazy.
You’re just running a high-overhead process with limited memory and no checkpointing.
Some Days Aren’t for Output
If all you do is switch gears—then not crashing is the win.
That’s the bar some days:
Don’t lose the thread completely.
If you made it to the end still holding even one idea intact, you did more than most systems manage under load.