Leave Yourself a Note Before You Stop Working

Coming back to a task you left mid-thought costs ten minutes of re-reading and re-orienting before you remember where you were going. Multiply that by every interruption in your day, and you have lost a real chunk of focused time to nothing but re-entry.

Before you close a task — even for a five-minute break — write one line: what you were doing and what comes next. "Finished the intro, next: pull the Q3 numbers into the table." It costs ten seconds now and saves ten minutes later, every single time.