The Cost of Being Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
In 1998, a Microsoft and former Apple executive named Linda Stone gave a name to something most people would recognise without needing the definition: continuous partial attention. Not multitasking - Stone was careful about that distinction. Multitasking is driven by a desire to be more efficient, ticking off routine tasks in parallel. Continuous partial attention is driven by something closer to anxiety: a constant scanning of every channel, every conversation, every possible signal, out of a wish to stay in the know and not miss anything.
Stone's phrase for the impulse behind it was a desire to be a 'live node on the network'. The urge driving continuous partial attention isn't really about getting more done - it's about wanting to feel plugged into everything happening around you at all times: every conversation, every email, every piece of information that might matter. Being a 'live node' means never being the one who's disconnected, out of the loop, or unreachable. It's status and belonging as much as it is productivity - the fear isn't 'I'll fall behind on work', it's closer to 'I'll miss something, or become irrelevant to the network, if I'm not constantly available'.
Leadership roles don't create the anxiety Stone described, but they do create the conditions that reward it — constant reachability, visible responsiveness, being the node everyone else routes through. The behaviour gets reinforced by the role whether or not the person driving it feels the underlying pull.
Gloria Mark has spent two decades putting numbers to the pattern Stone named. She's a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine — a field that sits between computer science and psychology, studying how people behave around information and technology rather than how the technology works.
In 2004, the average person spent about two and a half minutes on a screen before switching to something else. By the mid-2010s, that had fallen to 47 seconds — and it's stayed there. More striking is what happens after an interruption: Mark's broader research on interruption found it takes over 23 minutes, on average, to return to a task at the same depth of focus — a cost multitasking pays occasionally and CPA pays continuously.
Stone was describing office workers tethered to desktop email in the late 1990s. Add a phone that's gone everywhere the person does since the mid-2010s, one that surfaces a notification before the person has consciously chosen to look, and the scanning never actually stops — it just changes location. There is no room left that's fully off-network.
The pull isn't accidental, either. Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, has described how many apps are built around intermittent variable rewards — the same mechanism that makes slot machines difficult to put down. A pull-to-refresh, a notification badge, an unread count: each one offers an uncertain reward, and uncertainty is what keeps someone checking. Stone described a personal habit. Harris is describing the industry built to produce it. Willpower isn't just competing with itself. It's competing with product teams whose job is to win that competition.
For a leader, this isn't a productivity inconvenience. It's a structural one. Every decision made mid-scan is a decision made on a narrower slice of attention than the leader believes they're using. Every conversation had with a phone face-up on the table is a conversation the other person can feel isn't getting all of them. Presence is one of the few things a senior leader can offer that genuinely can't be delegated, and it's the first casualty of trying to be everywhere at once.
Given that, none of this is solved by willpower alone — the fix has to be structural, not just personal discipline. A few shifts make a real difference:
Create phone-free zones for real thinking. Anything requiring genuine judgement — a strategic decision, a difficult conversation, review of something complex — deserves a phone that's out of the room, not just face-down on the table. Face-down still pulls attention; visibility alone is enough to trigger the scanning impulse.
Protect blocks of at least 25 minutes for single-task work, and put them early. This isn't arbitrary — it's roughly the recovery time attached to a single interruption. High-performance coaches increasingly point to a related idea: most people have only a few hours of genuinely high-quality cognitive capacity in a day, and it tends to front-load. Spend it on meetings and email triage and there's little left for the work that actually needed it. Protect the block, and put it where the capacity still is.
Notice the discomfort of an unfilled moment. A pause before a meeting starts, a lift ride, the few seconds waiting for something to load — these gaps get reflexively filled, almost always with a screen. The instinct isn't really about missing something. It's a low tolerance for a moment with nothing happening. Left alone, that gap is often exactly where a useful thought surfaces.
Audit meeting load before adding more focus tactics. Back-to-back meetings don't look like continuous partial attention, but they manufacture it. Every gap between them becomes dead time filled by a reflexive check, and every meeting itself gets a fraction of attention because part of the mind is still carrying what didn't get finished in the last one. Fewer meetings and genuinely unscheduled time aren't a separate fix from the scanning problem — they're what removes the conditions that make scanning feel necessary.
Ask what a meeting or call actually needs from you before agreeing to it. This is where the live-node impulse shows up most visibly — being in the room while still scanning for what else needs a response. Full presence and nominal availability are different commitments, but most calendars treat them identically. Naming the difference in advance makes it easier to actually give one or the other, instead of defaulting to a half-attention version of both.
Being everywhere at once means never being fully present anywhere. It's an absence, just distributed widely enough to look like presence.
Sources: Linda Stone, ‘Continuous Partial Attention’ (lindastone.net) · Gloria Mark, ‘Attention Span’ (2023) and ‘The Cost of Interrupted Work’ (CHI ‘08) · Tristan Harris, ‘How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds’ (2016) · Vanessa Bennett, Next Evolution Performance — on cognitive energy and focus.