Why capable people feel unproductive

Discover the productivity issue few are talking about

Do you ever get to the end of a work day and think, "How can I be working this hard and getting so little done?"

You start the day with good intentions. You know exactly what needs to be done. You're busy from start to finish. Yet by 5pm, you’ve made little to no progress on that report, proposal or piece of work that really mattered.

If this sounds familiar, the issue may not be you. It might be the environment you're working in.

The digital workplace has transformed how we collaborate, communicate and get work done. Email, instant messaging, virtual meetings, shared documents and AI assistants have brought huge benefits. Work can now be shared, refined and completed faster than ever before.

What's often overlooked is that whilst the technology has evolved, we have not adapted our way of working to accommodate it.

When old ways of working meet a new world

Not long ago, work-related information and requests arrived through a relatively small number of channels. This made work easier to keep track of and interruptions were generally infrequent.

Today, requests, updates and reminders can appear at any moment. Information reaches us through emails, instant messages, task management tools and comments in shared documents.

As a result, the working day can start to feel a little like a game of whack-a-mole.

You answer one email and a message on Teams or Slack arrives. Just as you regain focus, a meeting reminder pops up.

Individually, none of these things seem particularly significant. Collectively, they consume cognitive resources and make it harder to focus on what matters most.

The hidden cost of constant switching

While whack-a-mole working may feel productive, constantly moving from one task to another comes at a price.

Research by Sophie Leroy gives us a name for one of those costs: attention residue.

When we switch from one task to another, part of our attention remains snagged on the previous task.

Even though we've left our inbox and moved back to our primary task, part of our brain is occupied with what we just dealt with, what we saw had come in and what still needs doing.

In other words, we don't switch cleanly. We drag work with us.

And the challenge doesn’t stop there. Each time we switch tasks, the brain needs time to rebuild context. We have to remind ourselves what the task is about, where we got to and what we were thinking about it.

Gloria Mark and her team have studied the impact of task switching in modern work. Their research suggests that while a quick email might take us away for a few minutes, recovering from it can take much longer.

They've found it can take up to 23 minutes to fully regain focus on the task we were working on before the interruption.

What’s more they found that people switch their attention remarkably frequently throughout the working day. The average knowledge workers switches from one thing to another every 47 seconds, as the next email, message or notification is never far away.

Over the course of a day, these costs begin to add up. Attention becomes fragmented. Context is lost. Progress slows. Mental energy is consumed.

The end result is that we feel drained and unproductive. Drained because our attention has been pulled in multiple directions all day, and unproductive because the work that mattered most has been repeatedly interrupted.

Performance = Potential - Interference

When working with individuals who come to me for help with focus and productivity issues, I share a simple equation developed by Tim Gallwey in the 1970s. I find it provides a useful starting point for discussing what's really going on.

Performance = Potential - Interference

Gallwey proposed that an individual's performance is a function of two things: their ability and anything that gets in the way of them using it.

In the workplace when people feel unproductive, they often assume the problem lies with them. They're disorganised, they need better willpower, they should work harder. The first part of the equation.

What often gets overlooked is the second part of the equation: interference.

Emails, messages and other forms of notification all compete for our attention, making it hard to focus on what matters most.

As a result, people can find themselves working longer to overcome a problem that isn't entirely of their own making.

The good news is that understanding the problem opens the door to a different solution. Rather than trying to squeeze ever more effort from ourselves, we can make small changes that reduce interference and create more space for focused work.

Little changes that reduce interference

You don't need to overhaul your entire working day to see an improvement. Clients tell me some of the biggest gains come from small, intentional actions.

For example:

• Turn off non-essential notifications to reduce unnecessary interruptions.

• Schedule time for important work before your day becomes dominated by other people's priorities.

• Allocate time for reviewing emails and messages where possible rather than responding to everything as it arrives.

• Batch similar tasks to minimise context switching.

The goal is to become more intentional about where your attention goes and less reactive to every demand that appears.

Perhaps it’s time to rethink how we work

Today's working environment makes it hard to stay focused on the work that matters most. Frequent task switching leads to fragmented attention and a steady drain on the cognitive resources we rely on for concentration, decision-making and problem-solving.

Many people respond by trying harder. Yet performance isn't only about effort or ability. It's also influenced by how much interference we have to deal with.

Recognising that can be liberating. Because once we stop seeing productivity as purely a personal issue, we can begin to make changes that help us work with greater focus, intention and effectiveness.

If this article has resonated with you, it may be time to consider what's getting in the way of your ability to work well. Stepping back can often reveal patterns and opportunities for change that are difficult to spot when you're caught up in the day-to-day demands of work.

A Workday Rethink Session gives you the opportunity to do exactly that. Together we'll explore how you work and identify practical ways to improve concentration, reduce distractions and create more space for focused work. References and further reading

Hari, J. (2022). Stolen focus: Why you can't pay attention—and how to think deeply again. Crown

Leroy, S. (2009). 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), 168–181.

Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 107–110.

Microsoft (2025). 2025 Annual Work Trend Index. Microsoft. https://news.microsoft.com/annual-work-trend-index-2025/

Rock, D. (2020). Your brain at work: Strategies for overcoming distraction, regaining focus, and working smarter all day long (Rev. ed.). HarperCollins.

Uncapher, M.R., & Wagner, A.D. (2018) Minds and brains of media multitaskers: Current findings and future directions, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(40), 9889–9896.