Attention Management in Projects: The Hidden Cost of Lost Focus
The gym was quiet when the substitute trainer took over. No preamble, no small talk. He just watched. From two steps back, arms crossed, studying every rep with the kind of attention that made it uncomfortable.
He took weight off the machine. He made me slow down. Shoulders down. Elbows up. Abs on. Breathe. It felt almost insultingly basic; until, a few weeks later, the chronic pain in my neck and arms that had been building all year was simply gone.
I've told that story to clients in the middle of projects more times than I can count. Because the pattern is the same: we are working hard, powering through, generating output and unwittingly degrading.
The problem isn't effort. It's that no one is watching the technique.
The reason I’m sharing this experience is that it’s a physical example of what happens when leaders stop noticing how their attention is being spent. In project leadership, change management, and retail transformation initiatives, the cost of that oversight is rarely visible until it starts degrading outcomes.
What most leaders get wrong about attention management
The somewhat accepted wisdom on focus that I’ve been living with for the past ‘n’ years runs something like this: minimise distractions, stay disciplined, and try to get into some type of ‘flow’ state. Get in the zone, stay in the zone.
Dr Gloria Mark, Chancellor Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine and author of Attention Span, spent two decades in real workplaces tracking this; and her findings dismantle much of the conventional wisdom.
Her numbers are striking. In 2004, people averaged 2.5 minutes of attention on any single screen before switching. By 2012, that had fallen to 75 seconds. By the time she published Attention Span, it had fallen further to 47 seconds. That’s a 97% decline in measured on-screen focus over two decades. That’s just about as long as I’ve been doing this job and when I reflect on the number of times I interrupt myself she doesn’t feel wrong.
Here is the part that matters for projects: when attention is pulled from a task, by a notification, a side conversation, or just a reflexive device check, it takes an average of 25 minutes and 26 seconds to fully return to the original work. Mark's research shows that 50% of those interruptions are self-inflicted. We are not just victims of distraction. We are actively participating in our own fragmentation and contributing to our own cognitive overload.
"You have limited cognitive resources. They're very precious. The crucial question is: how do you want to distribute them over the course of your day?" — Dr Gloria Mark
That question of attention distribution becomes particularly important when leaders are responsible for complex projects, operational efficiency, and decision making in project management.
The attention budget nobody is managing in project governance
In most systems implementation projects, the project and leadership team will track budget, headcount, and timelines. They will have a RAID log, a project governance framework, and a change plan. What we don’t consciously track is attention, and it’s the resource that drives whether all the others are well used.
Mark’s position is that attention should be treated as finite. It depletes with use, it is replenished only by genuine rest, and the conditions in which it is spent determine the quality of every decision made. When you run an all-day design workshop, launch a new communications channel mid-project, and ask the same people to manage BAU fire-fighting alongside system testing, you’re not ‘stretching resources’. You’re overdrawing the account.
The challenge is not simply workforce productivity. It is the quality of thinking available to the people responsible for delivery.
The Harvard Business Review research on application toggling adds a commercial edge to this: workers in knowledge roles toggle between apps and websites nearly 1,200 times per day. That adds up to just under four hours per week spent reorienting. Roughly nine percent of annual working time, evaporating into the friction of switching. In a six-month ERP implementation or ERP system implementation project, that is the equivalent of losing two full weeks of productive capacity per person, every month.
For retail leaders running systems projects alongside a live trading business, this is not a productivity note. It is a structural project risk. Whether the objective is retail digital transformation, broader retail transformation, or change management in ERP implementation, attention is often the resource under the greatest pressure and the least scrutiny.
How attention management improves project outcomes
Mark explicitly dismantles the idea that flow (deep, uninterrupted focus) should be the goal for most knowledge work. It’s too rare, individual, and not reliably schedulable. The healthier target is a dynamic balance of attentional states through the day.
This reframing changes how we might design project work to improve operational efficiency:
1. Schedule effortful work during peak attention windows.
Mark's research shows that most people have natural attention peaks mid-to-late morning and mid-afternoon. Requirements sessions, design decisions, and trade-off analysis belong in those windows. Status updates and low-stakes sign-offs do not.
2. Use lower-intensity work to reduce cognitive overload
Data clean-up, follow up, and documentation review are not signs of a slow day. If we put them after cognitively demanding sessions, they let our attention replenish while work still moves forward.
3. Treat channel sprawl as a project risk
Every new communication channel added to a project (a new Slack group, a live dashboard, a weekly email digest) adds to the attentional footprint.
Mark's research found that removing email for a single week in one organisation lengthened attention durations and measurably reduced stress. A single primary communication channel, with clear norms around response time, protects everyone's ability to do the actual work.
4. Protect problem definition during ERP implementation and change management
As we have argued before, the discomfort of not yet knowing the answer is where capability is built.
Mark's 47-second average on-screen means that AI tools, used without boundaries, favour rapid surface-level cycling over the slow, effortful sense-making and sense-checking that complex projects require.
This is particularly relevant in ERP implementation and change management environments, where attention management influences not only execution, but the quality of judgment behind critical decisions.
Your 3-question attention management audit
Before the next steering committee, design workshop, or go-live planning session, ask:
Where in this project are people doing the hardest cognitive work? Do they have the agency to schedule it at their optimum time?
How many active communications channels does this project have, and what is the switching cost?
When we review project decisions under pressure, can the people who made them articulate why (or are they defending AI-generated outputs they don't fully own)?
A related question worth considering is this: Can you measure team productivity without understanding how attention is being consumed, interrupted, and redirected throughout the day?
“Meta-awareness is like a muscle — the more you practise catching and redirecting your attention, the stronger it becomes."
~ Dr Gloria Mark
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