Evidencev1EV-005

Context switching costs 10-25 minutes of recovery time per…

Context switching costs 10-25 minutes of recovery time per switch: research on task-set reconfiguration shows that switching between cognitively demanding tasks imposes a recovery period before full performance is restored

Why This Is Evidence

Mark et al. attention residue research.

Source Lessons

Context switching has a hidden cost

Every time you switch tasks, you pay a recovery tax — between 10 and 25 minutes of degraded cognition while your brain reloads the previous context. This cost is invisible because you feel busy the entire time.

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