The Mid-Year Tax on Everything You Left Half-Done

Last June I did my mid-year review the way I do it every year. I printed my calendar, sat on the floor of my office, and read six months of my own life back to myself. Most of it I felt good about. One page stopped me cold: the running list I keep of "things I'll get to," which over six months had grown to 19 items. Every one of them an open loop, a small promise I had made to myself and left hanging.

My shoulders climbed toward my ears as I counted.

The work you finish costs you once. The work you half-finish keeps charging you, every day it stays open, in a currency you rarely think to measure: your attention.

TL;DR: Half-finished commitments keep their meter running. They sit in the back of your mind and tax the work you are trying to do. Researchers call it attention residue. The way out is to close or cut the open loops on purpose, at the halfway mark of the year.

What's really going on

A business professor named Sophie Leroy gave this a name in 2009. She called it attention residue: the slice of your mind that stays behind on the last task after you move to the next one. In her experiments, people who jumped to a new task before finishing the previous one did measurably worse on the new one. Part of their focus was still in the other room.

Leroy found the residue runs heaviest when the task you left was unfinished, rushed, or something you cared about. That describes almost every loop on my list. Her faculty research page keeps the work current, and the University of Washington published a readable summary if you want the short version.

The real cost hides one level down. It is what those 19 open loops do to the one thing in front of you right now.

Why the tax compounds

Every time your attention switches, you pay a reorientation fee. The American Psychological Association reports that the mental blocks created by toggling between tasks can eat up to 40% of someone's productive time. Forty percent. That is two days of a five-day week spent changing gears.

It gets more expensive when the switch is an interruption. Gloria Mark's team at UC Irvine measured how long it takes to return to a task after a single interruption, and the answer was about 23 minutes. Her research found those same interruptions raise stress and mental effort. Gallup documented the pattern years earlier, showing how chronic interruptions drain both output and well-being.

That is before we count the tools. A Harvard Business Review study of Fortune 500 employees found workers toggle between applications about 1,200 times a day, which adds up to nearly four hours a week spent reorienting. The Seattle Times covered the same research and called it software sprawl. Psychology Today has a plain account of the true cost of all this switching from the brain's point of view.

Stack those numbers and the math turns grim. This is a measurable cost, and it runs on loops you forgot you left open.

The mid-year reckoning

I run a 3.5-day workweek. I have since March 2023. People assume the hard part was cutting the days. The harder part was learning that a calendar with white space still fills up invisibly, with open loops nobody can see, including me.

So every June I do a reckoning. I take the list of 19 and I sort each item into one of two piles. Close it, or cut it. The third pile, the one called "keep carrying it," is where attention residue lives, and it had been my quiet default for years.

Closing means I give the loop an actual ending. Sometimes that is the email I have been drafting in my head for three weeks. Sometimes it is the yes or no I have been parking on "let me circle back," or the rough draft I finally finish badly so it stops being open. Cutting means I release it out loud. I tell the person it is over, take it off the list, and let the small grief of that pass through my chest.

My most expensive loop last year was a piece of writing I had promised myself since February. It never made the top of any week, so it sat at the bottom of every week, taxing all of it. Cutting it took 10 seconds and gave me back five months of low-grade guilt. A promise I keep half-made is a promise I am breaking slowly. Better to break it cleanly and free the attention it was eating.

What the closing pile does to your body

The first year I did this, I expected to feel productive. Instead I felt lighter. The knot under my collarbone, the one that had been there so long I had quit noticing it, loosened by the time I reached item 12.

I mean that literally. The body keeps a running tally your calendar cannot. The open loop you cannot finish gets recalled and rehearsed more often than the one you closed, which is why your mind keeps the tab open and the meter running. Close the tab and the meter stops.

This is the whole Simplicity Protocol in one move. Most productivity advice adds something: a new system, or one more morning routine you abandon by August. Subtraction works the other direction. You reclaim capacity by ending what drains you. Managing the drain more efficiently only keeps it running. The CTOs I coach hit this around the middle of the year, the same place I do, with the same surprised relief when they finally close the loops they have carried since January.

How to run your own mid-year subtraction

You do not need a framework for this. You need an hour and a willingness to be honest about what you have been avoiding.

Write down every open loop, the kind that never makes a to-do list: the promises and half-starts that live rent-free in your head, the "I should really" items you keep meaning to get to. Most people land somewhere between 15 and 30.

Then sort. Close or cut, one at a time. Watch which ones you keep wanting to move to that third pile, because those are the ones costing you the most. The loop you most want to avoid deciding on is the loop generating the most residue.

Do the cutting out loud where it involves another person. A loop you close only in your own head stays half-open to them, and it will come back. Tell them. Keep it kind and keep it clear.

The second half is lighter than the first

By the time I finished my list last June, 11 items were closed or cut. Eight survived, and those eight got my full attention because the other 11 were no longer stealing it.

The professionals I work with who do this report the same thing every year. The back half of their year feels lighter than the front. They did less of what was draining them, and more of what they were there to do.

So before you set a single goal for the rest of this year, ask the harder question first. What have you been carrying half-finished since January, and what would it free up if you finally put it down?

Frequently asked questions

What is attention residue?

Attention residue is the part of your focus that stays attached to a previous task after you switch to a new one. Sophie Leroy documented it in 2009. The effect is strongest when the earlier task was left unfinished, which is why half-done work costs more than the time it took.

Is attention residue the same as multitasking?

Multitasking is the act of switching between tasks. Attention residue is the cost left behind by the switch. You can stop multitasking today and still carry residue from a loop you left open last week.

How do I get rid of attention residue?

Give the open loop an ending. Finish it, set a concrete plan and time for it, or cut it entirely and tell anyone affected. A loop with a clear stopping point generates far less residue than one left vaguely open.

Why does a mid-year review help?

The halfway mark of the year is a natural audit point. Six months is long enough to accumulate open loops and short enough that closing them still changes how the rest of the year feels.