The Danger Isn't Your Calendar. It's What's Still Running in the Background When You Walk Into the Next Room
Inc.'s Tony Martignetti, citing research on "attention residue," argues a founder's real bottleneck isn't time management — it's carrying unresolved focus from one meeting into the next, and the cost of that divided attention rises as the company (and the audience watching you) grows.
Prompted by “The Danger Isn't Your Calendar. It's What's Still Running in the Background When You Walk Into the Next Room”, Inc.com (Tony Martignetti).
Most founders describe their overwhelm as a time problem. Tony Martignetti's latest Inc. column makes the case that it's actually a presence problem, and the two aren't fixed the same way.
The research behind it comes from Sophie Leroy, who found that when you switch from one task to the next without resolving it, part of your attention stays stuck on the first one — she calls it attention residue. It's strongest exactly when the task you left behind was time-pressured or high-stakes. In practice: you're in the one-on-one, but still running the board deck in the back of your mind. You're not doing two jobs well. You're doing the one in front of you badly, with a third of your brain somewhere else.
Why does this get worse as the company grows?
Here's the part that matters more once you've scaled than it does early on. A smaller company forgives some of this — fewer people are watching how present you are in any one room. Once you've got real department heads, key clients, and a leadership team reading your body language for signal, half-attention isn't neutral. People register it even when they can't name it. The cost of your divided focus goes up exactly as your company grows, which is backwards from what most CEOs assume.
At your next leadership or peer meeting, try this: before it starts, name out loud the one unresolved thing you're carrying in from the last meeting, and consciously set it down. Then don't let it back in until this conversation is over. Notice how much harder that is than it sounds.
Presence, not scheduling, is usually the real fix — it comes up often in 1:1 Coaching.
Originally posted on LinkedIn ↗