Focus Triad
Distracted · Typical · Deep
Three Task Switching Tax instances pre-seeded with different concurrent-task counts. Distracted assumes 8 contexts in flight (modern knowledge-worker default). Typical is 3 (one primary project, batched messaging, one strategic block). Deep is single-threaded — the thing most people never actually try.
The math: retention = 0.80(n−1). At n=8, only 21% of your hours survive context-switching overhead. At n=3 it's 64%. At n=1 it's 100%.
How the triad works
Each pillar is a namespaced Task Switching Tax instance. State is kept in separate
localStorage keys (task-switching-tax-v1__distracted,
__typical,
__deep). On first visit the
triad pre-seeds each with its starting tasks/hours; after that your edits persist per pillar.
Adjust any column to explore your specific situation — change "Distracted" from 8 to 12 to see what a Slack-saturated week looks like, or push "Deep" up to 10 hours to model a weekend retreat.
The decision signal is the gap between distracted hours and deep-work hours. If the deep column creates the same output with fewer nominal hours, the next move is not motivation; it is fewer active contexts, clearer handoff rules, or protected blocks where messages cannot keep reopening the work.