The Cost of Leaving Every Tab Open
Too Many Tabs Open
I was helping my neighbor the other day. She’s new to smartphones, and she was frustrated that her battery kept dying so fast. So I showed her something … all those apps she thought she’d closed? Still running in the background. She wasn’t actively in them, but they were still open, still draining power, still there. She had to actually swipe up and close them.
That stuck with me, because I think that’s exactly what we do to ourselves when we multitask.
The Myth of Multitasking
Here’s the thing: multitasking isn’t really a thing. Neuroscience backs this up. Our brains aren’t actually built to run two conscious tasks at once. What feels like multitasking is really rapid task-switching, and every switch has a cost. We think we’re doing two things at once, but we’re not. We’re doing one thing at a time and yanking our attention back and forth. And every time we do, we lose a little bit of our ability to do either thing well. Just like my neighbor’s phone, we’re running background apps we never fully closed, and it’s draining our battery all day long.
And here’s a stat that stopped me in my tracks: research suggests that almost 50% of our waking hours, we’re thinking about something other than what we’re actually doing. Half our life, essentially on autopilot or somewhere else entirely. When I put that next to the multitasking piece, it clicked for me … we’re not just switching between tasks, we’re often not even fully present for the one task in front of us to begin with.
What Divided Attention Really Costs
Here’s what’s actually at risk when leaders try to split their attention:
- Your battery drains faster than you realize. Every open tab, every half-finished conversation, every task you switched away from without closing is still running in the background, still pulling power. You don’t notice it in the moment, you just notice you’re exhausted by 2pm and you’re not sure why.
- Quality drops on everything, not just one thing. Divided attention doesn’t mean you do two things at 50% each, often both suffer more than that.
- It compounds. One open tab is manageable. A calendar full of them, day after day, is how leaders end up chronically depleted. Not because any single task was too hard, but because nothing ever got fully closed out.
- People can tell. When your attention is split, the person you’re with feels it, even if you never say a word. I learned that firsthand when my plate became so full that I found myself rushing important conversations between meetings. In my “let’s walk and talk” request, I wasn’t fully there, and they knew it. Divided attention isn’t a private cost; someone else pays for it too.
That’s where intention comes in. Living with intention means choosing, on purpose, how you’re going to show up in a moment… and then actually closing the tab when you’re done, instead of leaving it running while you move to the next thing. This is a lot of what coaching does for leaders: it helps them practice choosing their intention instead of letting the day choose it for them.
Close the Tab
This week, pick one interaction — a conversation with a team member, a moment with your family, a piece of work — and give it your full, closed-app attention. No background tabs running. Notice what’s different about the quality of that time versus your usual split-screen default.