You close a document to join a meeting, but part of your mind keeps drafting the paragraph you left behind. Later, you open the file again and spend several minutes remembering what you meant to do next. The calendar records one switch. Your attention has to make two: away from the first task and back into it later.

Organizational researcher Sophie Leroy uses “attention residue” for thoughts about one task that persist after a person has moved to another. In a later study, Leroy and Theresa Glomb tested what happens when people are interrupted and expect to resume the first task under time pressure. Their results make a simple handoff worth trying: leave yourself a clear place to begin again.

A task switch needs a landing place

Most work systems record what is due. Fewer capture the exact point where thinking stopped. A project name or reminder such as “finish report” may tell you what the task is, but not which question remains open or what action would restart it.

In a later set of four studies, Leroy and Theresa Glomb tested a “ready-to-resume” plan for interrupted work. The plan briefly records how someone will return to the first task. Their 2018 paper in Organization Science reports that this intervention reduced attention residue in the studied settings and helped protect performance on the interrupting task.

The authors tested defined experimental conditions, so the results do not establish that a note will erase distraction in every kind of work. The intervention is brief enough to try without turning an urgent interruption into paperwork. The practical question is whether you can leave yourself a clear starting point.

A separate 2022 study of task transitions found that engagement can carry forward positively while attention to an earlier task can also linger. Its field study followed 20 crew members in NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog across 477 task transitions; a second study involved 346 laboratory participants. Those settings are unusual, so the result is best read as evidence that transitions can have mixed effects, not as a forecast for every workday.

Write a ready-to-resume note

Before you leave a task, write a few lines where you will see them when you return. Keep the note short enough to finish in a minute:

  • Where I stopped: the file, section, decision, or conversation in progress.
  • What remains open: the unresolved question or dependency.
  • My next physical action: the first visible step, such as “compare the two draft openings” or “send the revised table to Maya.”
  • When I will return: a realistic time or a cue, such as “after the 2 p.m. call.”

The next action is the useful part. “Work on the presentation” is still a broad assignment. “Open slide 6 and replace the outdated chart with the April figures” gives you a place to begin. If you do not know the answer yet, write down the question rather than pretending the task is settled.

Keep the note smaller than the system

Keep the practice small. A line in the document, a note beside the task, or a sentence in your paper notebook can work. Put it somewhere you will naturally encounter when you resume; a separate inbox can become one more place to check.

Try the note on tasks that are difficult to re-enter: a draft with several open decisions, a spreadsheet you are interpreting, or a project that gets interrupted by meetings. After a week, notice whether the note saves you from reconstructing context. If it does not, change the format or stop using it. The point is to reduce the cost of restarting, not to keep another ritual alive.

Some work cannot wait for a tidy transition. A customer needs help, a colleague has an urgent question, or the building alarm goes off. In those moments, a one-sentence bookmark may be all there is time for. Some tasks are also better ended naturally than repeatedly paused. The studies offer a way to make handoffs gentler while leaving room for the demands of the job.

The physical setting can help too. If your work allows it, a quieter place may make it easier to return to a thought. Our guide to finding more in a familiar public library includes questions to ask about study areas and access, since those services differ by location.

Make returning easier than remembering

A useful transition note is a message to the person who will reopen the task: you. It records where the work stands, what remains unresolved, and what to do first. That handoff gives you a place to start when the day brings you back to it.