Confession: My Brain, Too Many Tabs
I should start with a confession: when it comes to multitasking, the general new trend is that it doesn’t work and it should be avoided, and I’ve always pushed back on this notion for a very concrete reason. This reason is that general rules reflect an abilist approach, and things might be different for me than for most of you. To keep it real, I have a form of ADHD, diagnosed as an adult, and my relationship with multitasking has always been complicated. Where others see chaos, I often see a kind of fragile balance. Switching between windows, conversations, and tools isn’t just a distraction; sometimes it’s the only way my brain can breathe. Juggling tasks becomes a relief valve, a way to keep the pressure from building up too much in one place when it isn’t needed.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy. My coping strategy has always been to avoid the kinds of work I know I’ll fail at: laundry, taxes, you name it. Anything that requires sustained precision and patience. This of course requires coming from a privileged background: not everybody can resort to take-away just because they can’t focus on boiling water for a dish of spaghetti. I’ve gotten very good at deflecting, at masking, at being “high functioning.” But that label, often used as a backhanded compliment, is a harmful one: it assumes a neurodivergent can’t be considered a valuable society member unless they appear seamless, it undermines the exhaustion that follows, and doesn’t put the correct blame where it lies. In society, instead of on the individual.
So yes, I can manage dozens of tabs open at once. Yes, I can look “on top of things” in a meeting while Slack buzzes, email refreshes, and Revit crashes in the background. But what looks like competence is often survival. And here lies the paradox: multitasking is both my necessity and my overload. The same coping mechanism that helps me navigate daily work also sets me up for the very fragmentation I’m about to critique.
1. The Digital Office as a Fragmented Landscape
If the physical office once fractured our attention with ringing desk phones, impromptu drop-ins, and endless meetings, the digital office has multiplied these demands while making them invisible. What looks, on the surface, like seamless integration — Slack for messaging, Zoom for meetings, Trello for task tracking, Revit for design work, email for everything in between — is in reality a patchwork of competing demands on the same fragile resource: our attention.
The irony is that every one of these tools is designed to reduce friction. A Slack ping is meant to be quicker than drafting an email, and the name itself evokes taking a rest from something. A Zoom invite collapses geography into a click, and the name itself implies being quick in and out of things. A Trello card visualises workflow without the need for a status meeting. But in practice, they accumulate like sediment, layering interruptions until focus becomes the rarest commodity in the room. Gloria Mark’s research at the University of California, Irvine, shows that the average office worker is interrupted or switches tasks every three minutes, and it can take over 20 minutes to recover full focus after such a disruption. This means that what feels like a quick, “zero-cost” interruption actually drains enormous amounts of cognitive energy.
In sociology, Richard Sennett has written about the “corrosion of character” in flexible work environments, where constant reorientation erodes both narrative continuity and professional identity. Applied to the digital office, his argument resonates with the way workers must continuously reassemble themselves, threadbare, across different contexts. A conversation about a design clash on Slack gives way to a Trello card about project milestones, which is abruptly interrupted by a Zoom call where email notifications flash in the corner of the screen. Each shift demands a subtle cognitive reorientation: Who am I in this space? What role am I performing here? What did I just leave behind?
Neuroscience suggests our brains are not wired for such incessant toggling. Cognitive control — the ability to maintain focus while filtering distractions — is a finite resource governed by the prefrontal cortex. Studies on task-switching costs (see Rubinstein, Meyer, and Evans, back in 2001) show that even when interruptions feel instantaneous, they introduce measurable delays and errors. The “zero-cost interruption” is a myth born of interface design: the click is free, but the reorientation is not.
The result is a workplace where attention itself becomes the most contested territory. The economist Herbert Simon once noted that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention,” (‘Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World’ in Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest from 1971) a phrase that now reads less like theory and more like prophecy. In the digital office, attention is the bottleneck, not bandwidth. And unlike software licenses or cloud storage, attention cannot be scaled.
2. The Culture of Always-On
If fragmentation is the landscape of the digital office, then the culture of “always-on” is its climate: pervasive, inescapable, and shaping every habit of work. What matters is not only what tools we use, but how they discipline us into specific rhythms of responsiveness. In many organisations, speed of reply has become a proxy for commitment, and visibility a stand-in for value. The green dot on Slack or Teams — signifying presence — quietly replaces the office chair as the ultimate proof of productivity.
This culture of hyper-responsiveness is not accidental. In her work on “the temporalities of work,” Judy Wajcman observes how digital technologies blur the boundary between working time and personal time, creating what she calls “temporal entanglement.” Messages arrive across time zones, and workers, eager to signal reliability, respond outside traditional hours. What was once asynchronous — the letter, the fax, even the email — is now collapsed into a demand for immediacy. The “quick ping” has become the lingua franca of contemporary labour.
Yet this immediacy comes at a cost. The Stanford psychologist Clifford Nass, in his 2009 research on media multitasking, found that people who pride themselves on constant switching are actually more distractible, less able to filter irrelevant information, and slower at task-switching itself. What feels like competence — being available, responsive, on top of every channel — is in fact a form of cognitive exhaustion masquerading as efficiency. Fragmentation is recoded as productivity because it is visible, measurable, and easily reported in dashboards and metrics, unlike the slow, invisible labour of deep thinking.
The accumulation is subtle but relentless. A “quick check-in” on Slack begets three threads, two emoji reactions, and a follow-up meeting. A single “just circling back” email pulls a whole group out of focus. Each tiny request carries an implicit message: your availability is assumed, your attention is negotiable, your work can always be paused. Taken individually, these moments feel negligible; taken together, they produce what sociologist Mark Fisher once called the “privatisation of stress,” where systemic pressures are internalised as individual failings. If you can’t keep up, it’s your fault.
And so we learn to equate responsiveness with worth, even as our capacity for sustained concentration erodes. The always-on culture doesn’t simply fragment our time; it colonises it, turning every idle moment into a potential site of labour. What gets lost is not only productivity in any meaningful sense, but also the possibility of work that is unhurried, reflective, and genuinely creative.
If the fragmented landscape and the always-on culture describe the problem, the natural question becomes: how do we live with it? Here I want to resist the easy dichotomy of “just turn off notifications” or “embrace the chaos.” Neither extreme captures the reality of working in digital environments where collaboration depends on availability, yet concentration depends on boundaries. Instead, I’ll offer two sets of strategies: coping from the inside out, rooted in personal experiments and mental hygiene, and coping from the outside in, built around collective agreements and organisational practices. Both matter, because survival in the digital office is as much about rewiring our own habits as it is about reshaping the norms we share.
3. Coping from the Inside Out
Over the years, I’ve tried dozens of tactics to manage the ‘too many windows’ reality, some half-baked, some surprisingly durable. The unifying theme is not discipline — an elusive ideal for most neurodivergent people — but scaffolding: small structures that create enough friction to break the cycle of endless toggling.
One such scaffold is the timer. Borrowed from the Pomodoro Technique but adapted loosely, you can set a 25-minute countdown for a single task, with the explicit permission to abandon it guilt-free when the timer ends. The trick is that the timer externalises urgency: it’s not my scattered brain telling me to switch, it’s the clock nudging me to pause. Neuroscience backs this up; temporal structuring helps reduce decision fatigue, freeing the brain from the burden of constantly negotiating “should I switch or stay?”
Another experiment has been what I call tab purges. When I feel my browser becoming a graveyard of half-finished thoughts, I’ll close everything ruthlessly, trusting that whatever truly matters will resurface in my inbox or memory. This is less about organisation than about ritual: a way of reclaiming agency when the sprawl starts to feel unmanageable.
Then there are single-task sprints, moments when I deliberately silence Slack, mute email, and give myself a protected time slot for deep work. I won’t pretend these are easy or consistent, but when they succeed, the relief is palpable. Flow states are rare in a digital office, but when they arrive, they remind me why the effort is worth it.
Finally, there’s the paradoxical strategy of knowing when to stop fighting the chaos. Some days, especially with ADHD, multitasking is simply the path of least resistance. On those days, bouncing between tabs becomes its own rhythm: messy, imperfect, but strangely productive. The key is permission: to recognise that not every window has to be closed, not every distraction is failure. Sometimes survival is success.
4. Coping from the Outside In
Individual tactics can only go so far. No timer or tab purge will solve the deeper problem if the culture of work itself rewards instant responsiveness and penalises silence. Coping from the outside in means shifting attention from personal discipline to collective agreements, because the conditions for focus are never just individual; they are social.
The first step is deceptively simple: making response times explicit. In too many teams, expectations remain unspoken, which leads to the tyranny of assumed immediacy. When does a Slack message require a reply? Five minutes, five hours, or five days? By defining shared norms — urgent issues via phone call, routine updates in daily summaries, deep work protected by a “do not disturb” tag — teams can reframe silence not as absence, but as respect for focus. Sociologist Judy Wajcman notes that temporal norms in organisations are rarely natural; they are negotiated. Surfacing those negotiations is itself an act of care.
Structural fixes matter just as much. Meeting-free blocks, whether an afternoon a week or entire Fridays, provide a collective permission slip for uninterrupted concentration. Companies like Asana and Shopify have formalised “No Meeting Wednesdays,” with reported gains in both productivity and morale. These practices acknowledge what everyone knows but few articulate: back-to-back calls don’t just consume time, they shred continuity. Creating shared calendars that honour focus time is a way of shifting responsibility from the individual — who must constantly decline or dodge meetings — to the group, which collectively safeguards attention.
Technology, finally, is both a culprit and a cure. The same tools that scatter our focus can also consolidate it, if used deliberately. Integrations that funnel project notifications into a single channel, focus modes that batch alerts, and asynchronous dashboards that replace real-time check-ins are small steps toward taming the chaos. Here, design matters: defaults of constant notification reinforce the always-on culture, while defaults of digest and delay can cultivate patience. As Cal Newport has argued in A World Without Email, the future of knowledge work depends less on heroic multitasking and more on designing systems that minimise “the hyperactive hive mind.”
Coping from the outside in is not about eliminating interruptions altogether — that would be impossible, and perhaps undesirable — but about distributing the costs more fairly. When teams agree on boundaries, when organisations create structures for depth, when technologies are tuned for human brains rather than for engagement metrics, the digital office becomes less of a battlefield for attention and more of a place where real work can happen.
5. Why This Matters
It would be easy to treat digital overload as a minor annoyance, the white noise of contemporary work. But the costs run deeper, both personally and collectively.
On a personal level, the toll is emotional: the quiet accumulation of stress, guilt, and burnout. Each interruption may last only seconds, but the aftermath lingers in the nervous system. Gloria Mark’s research shows that workers under conditions of high interruption report significantly higher stress and frustration levels, even when their output remains the same. The cruel irony is that because performance metrics rarely measure emotional strain, workers internalise the problem: if I feel drained, it must be my fault. Guilt compounds the fatigue: guilt for not replying fast enough, guilt for failing to focus, guilt for longing for quiet in a culture that rewards noise.
The collective cost is equally severe. Collaboration becomes fractured, reduced to a series of shallow exchanges scattered across tools. Anthropologist David Graeber once noted that much of modern bureaucracy consists of “endless communication about communication,” and the digital office magnifies this tendency. Teams risk confusing busyness with progress, responsiveness with alignment. Meetings proliferate because no one trusts the silence between them. The outcome is a strange inversion: workers spend more time coordinating work than doing it.
What’s lost in this churn is not only efficiency, but also possibility. Depth and flow — the states in which creativity, insight, and problem-solving flourish — require sustained attention. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defined flow as an “optimal state of consciousness” where challenge and skill align, producing both joy and performance. But flow cannot survive in an environment of constant interruption. The missed opportunity is therefore profound: entire organisations forfeiting the conditions that make breakthrough thinking possible, substituting speed for substance.
Why this matters is not just about the health of individual workers, but about the health of work itself. A culture that normalises fragmentation risks burning out its people while starving itself of the very depth and creativity it claims to prize. If the digital office continues to mistake availability for value, it will keep draining the resource it needs most: the focused, reflective attention of its workers.
Toward a Kinder Digital Office
If the story so far has been one of fragmentation and fatigue, the way forward must be one of redesign. The first step is to redefine productivity, shifting the measure from responsiveness to resonance. Quick replies and visible busyness are easy to track, but they tell us little about whether the work actually matters, whether it contributes to insight, alignment, or impact. Resonance — work that lands, that deepens understanding, that builds trust — is harder to quantify, but far more valuable. A culture that prizes resonance over reaction is one that privileges depth over distraction.
Second, we must design workflows for human brains, not just for machines. Our tools often assume infinite attention, instantaneous context-switching, and frictionless memory retrieval—capacities that no human possesses. Instead of asking workers to adapt endlessly to the logic of the software, systems should be built to respect human rhythms: periods of flow, cycles of rest, limits of working memory. This doesn’t mean abandoning technology; it means configuring it differently, resisting defaults that optimise for engagement metrics rather than for cognitive sustainability.
Finally, this is an invitation to share and adapt strategies. The fragmented digital office is not an individual failing but a shared condition. Coping cannot stop at timers and tab purges, nor at meeting-free afternoons and muted channels. It must also involve conversation: talking openly about the emotional toll of overload, acknowledging the privilege built into certain coping mechanisms, and experimenting with collective norms. Each team, each organisation, will need to find its own balance, but no one should have to navigate it alone.
A kinder digital office is possible. It is not a matter of nostalgia for quieter times, but a deliberate choice to value focus, care, and depth in a culture that too often confuses motion with meaning. The challenge is real, but so is the opportunity: to reclaim attention as a resource worth protecting, and to build workplaces where windows open not onto chaos, but onto clarity.
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