Cal Newport

It takes a lot of effort to do symbolic thinking

to think about abstract concepts.

And we know it takes 10 to 20 minutes to fully change our attention context from one abstract target to another.

It takes a long time.

That's why if you sit down to write something, everyone has this experience.

The first five or 10 minutes, like, man, this is terrible.

Like, I'm making no progress or whatever.

And then after a while, you're like, oh, this is starting to flow.

Like, it's going better.

That's because it took that much time

for your brain to load up all of the relevant information and to inhibit all the unrelated circuits and get your brain really ready to do that activity.

So if you now interrupt that brain once every two minutes, it never can lock in on anything.

And what you feel then is this sort of diffuse cognitive friction that we begin to experience as fatigue, cognitive fatigue.

And it's a really frustrating experience.

It's why if you go to an email inbox,

You're like, I have time.

I'm going to empty this inbox.

I'm going to go message by message.

Here's the best way to do it, right?

On paper, I'm going to go message by message and I'm going to answer these messages.