A typical modern workday for any one of us is filled with a steady, sometimes seemingly random stream of tasks, messages, and updates from countless tools and platforms. A new email from Debra in Accounting, a Slack message from Eli in Marketing, and a ticket in JIRA from Roger in Sales - all about Project X. Or maybe Project X and Y. Regardless, with so much information coming at us, it’s easy to feel like we’re constantly trying to keep up. Yet, despite this constant flow, one critical aspect of productivity is often overlooked: context.
We’ve all had those moments when we’re switching between tabs or applications, and we lose track of what we were doing or trying to accomplish. We might open an email, but we can’t remember why we opened it in the first place. Or we navigate to a project management tool, but find ourselves hunting for the details we need, attempting to link it with other information in other apps that relate to the same issue. Opening, hunting, linking, copying, pasting, uploading, downloading, Slacking, emailing - doing all of this in an attempt to connect the dots. We end up wasting valuable time trying to hold and update context.
The problem isn’t in the tools themselves. The real problem is that our tools are not designed to recognize, retain, or carry context across tasks and apps. They’re designed to execute discrete actions, without acknowledging the broader picture of what we’re trying to achieve. Why? Because the operating systems of our computers allow our tools to retain only the content of what we’re working on, siloed from one another. And THAT is where our productivity breaks down.
The Fragmentation of Context
Context is not just about remembering what you were working on - it’s about understanding why you’re working on it and how it fits into the bigger picture. Whether it’s a project, a conversation, or a task list, contextual awareness is the glue that connects everything, making it easier to make decisions, stay focused, and work efficiently.
But since our digital tools are fragmented and siloed, we find ourselves using a variety of apps for different purposes - email and Slack for communication, project management tools for tasks, calendars for scheduling - but none of these tools talk to each other. They don’t inherently share content or context.
When you switch from your email to your project management tool, it’s like you’re starting fresh each time. You’re faced with disconnected systems that don’t recognize the what or why of your work. And in that gap, productivity suffers. Alignment suffers. Collaboration suffers.
Attention Management - More Than Just Focus
While the problem of context fragmentation is severe, there’s also the issue of attention management. When we say attention management, we’re not just talking about staying focused on one task at a time. We’re talking about something deeper - the management of coherence between your own mental model and the information the computer is presenting to you.
At its core, attention management involves matching your reality - what you need to focus on, what’s important, what needs your attention next - with the computer’s perception of your reality.
Today, computers are simply containers of information. They have no awareness, no curiosity, and no understanding of what’s important to you. They don’t know which tasks require your attention, what can be ignored, or what’s urgent versus what’s important. This lack of awareness forces you to manually filter through a flood of data and distractions, hoping you don’t miss anything critical.
For example, let’s say you’re deep into a project, and you receive a notification for a new email. You shift your focus to respond to the email and open up a few more tabs to pull up some information, but in doing so, you lose track of the project you were working on. You haven’t just lost focus - you’ve disrupted the coherence of your workflow, and the new tabs you opened up are left unaddressed and uncategorized.
The email might be important, and the tabs might be relevant to another project, but they’re irrelevant to the task you’re engaged in at that moment. What you need is the system’s ability to recognize this and prevent the distraction, maintaining coherence in your work.
True attention management isn’t just about keeping focus on one thing. It’s about ensuring that the information you receive aligns with where you are in your work. It’s about creating a system that understands the context of your work and prioritizes information accordingly - keeping only what’s relevant and either discarding or organizing what isn’t. This approach goes beyond focus optimization - it’s about contextual relevance.
When the information demanding your attention is out of sync with your task at hand, it leads to unnecessary cognitive strain. Instead of smoothly moving between tasks, you’re constantly forced to switch between what’s urgent and what’s important, leading to stress, burnout, and ultimately lower productivity. What’s needed is an operating system that not only recognizes your focus, but understands your context and helps you align your attention with your priorities.
The Missing Link is Contextual Awareness
The real challenge then is that today’s computers don’t understand our work in the way we need them to. They are containers of information, not intelligent systems that can align with our needs, priorities, and focus. They don’t know what’s important to us, when we need to focus, or when we need a break. They can’t prioritize information based on our current task or proactively support us in staying on track. They don’t have access to our context.
The missing link - contextual awareness - is what’s holding back real productivity in the digital age. Without it, we’re left trying to piece together disconnected data and manage our attention manually, leading to frustration, inefficiency, and burnout. But in order for computers to help us manage our attention, they need to be curious about our realities. They need to understand not just what we’re working on, but why we’re working on it, and what is most important in that moment.
Imagine if your computer was able to recognize your context, be curious about your goals, and provide the right information at the right time - without you having to think about it or manually filter through distractions. Wow. How awesome would that be - automatically understanding what you need to focus on, filter out what doesn’t matter in that moment, all while keeping track of your priorities and ongoing tasks?
True productivity requires a system that aligns your reality with the computer’s understanding of it - keeping your work coherent, relevant, and most importantly, supported. The computer becomes an intelligent partner in managing your attention, rather than a passive container of disconnected information.
This shift requires a new approach. One that combines contextual awareness with curiosity about our needs and work processes. It’s not just about keeping us focused. It’s about understanding our context so that we can do our best work, seamlessly and efficiently.
That is the future of work.
And Reframe is building that future right now.
Curious to see how it works? Sign up for our waitlist today and be one of the first to experience an operating system that finally understands you and your work - one that makes managing attention easy and intuitive.
