Ready-to-Resume Plan

What it is

The phrase comes from the title of the 2018 paper: "Tasks Interrupted: How Anticipating Time Pressure on Resumption of an Interrupted Task Causes Attention Residue and Low Performance on Interrupting Tasks and How a 'Ready-to-Resume' Plan Mitigates the Effects." The title carries the whole argument. Most research on interruption asks what the interruption does to the task that was interrupted. This paper asks what it does to the task that arrives in its place, which is where attention residue shows up.

The authors predicted that when people expect to return to interrupted work under time pressure, they find it harder to give their attention to the interrupting task. Part of their attention stays with the unfinished work, which is attention residue, and performance on the interrupting task falls. The plan is the remedy they tested. It draws on research on implementation intentions, the finding that deciding in advance when and how you will act makes the action more likely. The abstract names that research as one of three bodies of work the authors drew on, with attention residue and time pressure. Briefly reflecting on the return and planning it reduced the residue, and performance on the interrupting task did not suffer when people used it.

The plan is deliberately small. In the description given by the University of Washington Bothell news service, the plan is to take a minute when interrupted to note your place in the project and your planned next step. Leroy is quoted there as saying the plan "allows the temporary, cognitive closure that makes the attention switch possible." Closure is the operative word. It links this finding to Leroy's 2009 experiments, in which time pressure helped attention move on only when it came while finishing the first task.

In effect

The 2009 and 2018 results look opposed and are not. In 2009, people who finished a task under time pressure showed fewer signs that their attention was stuck on it, and Leroy explained this as a sense of closure. In 2018, people who expected to resume an interrupted task under time pressure were worse off on the task in front of them. Time pressure helped when it came with finishing and hurt when it was expected on return. In both, what decided the outcome was whether the earlier task felt settled enough for attention to leave it, and the plan is a cheap way of producing that feeling when the task cannot be finished.

A related result comes from a different design. E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister reported in 2011 that plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals, and in their experiments a specific plan for an unfinished goal removed the intrusive thoughts it otherwise produced. Their subject was goals rather than interrupted tasks, so it is a neighbour of the ready-to-resume finding and not a replication of it. It does show that the idea of settling an open task by planning it was not invented in 2018.

The timing matters for anyone reading popular books on focus. Cal Newport's Deep Work, published in 2016, cites Leroy's 2009 paper correctly and could not have cited the 2018 study. A reader who acts on the book alone is acting on the first half of the research.

What it does not say

It does not say how large the benefit is. The abstract reports that four studies supported the authors' hypotheses and gives no effect sizes, and our reading stopped at the abstract and the publisher's page. The abstract does not say whether the participants were students, employees or others, so we do not state who they were.

It does not say the effect has been independently confirmed. Every study in this line that we found carries Leroy's name, and our review of the literature found no independent replication and no large multi-laboratory test. The work is carefully designed and consistent with the wider task-switching literature, and it is still the product of mostly one research group.

It does not say that a plan restores a mind to full strength. The reported result is that residue was reduced and performance on the interrupting task did not suffer. It does not say how long the plan takes in practice beyond the news report's phrase about a minute, and it gives no duration for how long attention residue lasts.

It does not rest on the Zeigarnik effect. That older claim, that interrupted tasks are better remembered than finished ones, did not hold up as a memory advantage in a 2025 meta-analysis of 38 publications. Attention residue and the plan are claims about where attention goes, measured by performance and by the speed of recognising related words, and they do not depend on that memory result.

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