Why Scattered Context Is Killing Your Team’s Focus

[Evan Fishman - Quely for Jira]

Every notification costs you 20+ minutes of deep focus.

Multiply that across your day, and you see why modern work feels like drowning.

Research from UC Irvine shows that once interrupted, it takes 23 minutes to regain flow.

Now think about how many pings, “quick questions,” and meetings reset your brain’s recovery clock.

But what’s really behind all those interruptions?
A lack of shared context.

When decisions live in Slack threads, Jira comments, docs, and someone's memory… every task becomes a scavenger hunt:

“Where did we talk about this?”
“Who approved that?”
“Why did we scope it this way?”

That hunt fractures your focus.

Every search restarts the 23-minute timer.

The result?
- Cognitive debt
- Scattered thinking
- Lost decisions

Work shouldn’t be a memory test.

Every decision deserves a home, clear, structured, and searchable.

So teams can stop repeating conversations, and start moving faster with confidence.

[Christopher Holmes]

We are driving further down the Agile road to help resolve some of this.  In a perfect world you would complete your Agile 'ceremonies' and the Devs would go in a room lock the door and run the sprint and just do your stand ups and communicate as needed.  Rinse and repeat.  We are looking at carefully crafted roles and tool use to reduce this 'scatter'. 

How are you doing it?

[Debbie Lindsey]

We are not successful with obtaining this state of sprint bliss.  As a Scrum Master, I have 3 teams with members in 3 different time zones.  They all want to meet at the same time, mostly in the mornings, Obviously, I cannot attend all their meetings and scrum events. By the afternoon, I feel brain dead because of all the context switching.

I try my best to empower the team to self-organize and self-facilitate themselves.  Through some automated metrics and chats monitored, I can easily watch their progress for their sprint goals and intercede when needed.  I trust my teams to maintain the quality and integrity throughout the sprint.  I take notes and enter them in the retrospective virtual white board to talk about certain behaviors and decisions that I observed to hold them accountable and guide them through opportunities for improvement.