Half a spreadsheet into a deadline last Thursday, the familiar ping of a phone notificatin went off. Ninety seconds later I sat back down with zero idea which cell I'd been building toward.

That gap, the fog after the fix, is what this issue kills. By the end you'll have a free method that hands your train of thought back to you intact, and the tool I built so I stop losing it in the first place.

Your brain wasn't built to survive forty interruptions a day without something to catch what falls out of it when you get yanked away.

Gloria Mark's team at UC Irvine found it takes over 23 minutes to return to the same depth of focus you had before an interruption. Some of that time gets spent twice: once handling whatever pulled you away, again staring at a blank doc trying to remember which idea you were mid-sentence on.

If you write, code, analyze, or build anything that needs more than one uninterrupted thought in a row, and you're also raising kids, you already know this tax. You pay it five, ten, fifteen times a day. That's a missing system, running under a life that never stops interrupting you.

Skip this issue if your day already runs in one uninterrupted block behind a closed door. If it looks more like mine, an inbox, two kids, and a job that doesn't pause for either, keep going.

The system: capture in three fields

Here's the free version. No app required.

Next time something pulls you away mid-task, before you deal with the interruption, write three lines. Sticky note, phone, the back of a school permission slip, doesn't matter.

1. Doing: what you were actually working on, in plain language.
2. Next step: the very next physical action. Not the whole plan. This field does the heavy lifting.
3. Note: anything else your brain is holding onto so it can let go of it.

Stack them if you get interrupted mid-interruption (it happens more than you'd think). Newest card on top, last in first out. When you come back, you don't reconstruct anything. You read three lines and you're moving again.

The copy/paste template

DOING:
NEXT STEP:
NOTE:
PARKED AT: [time]

Drop it in Notes, Obsidian, a plain sticky, whatever's already open.

Picture next Thursday evening. Kids are down, you've got one hour that's actually yours, and instead of five minutes of "okay wait, where was I," you read three lines and you're back in the sentence, the formula, the argument, exactly where you left it. That hour is worth twice as much because none of it burns down to re-entry.

Why I built the app anyway

I ran this exact method on sticky notes for months. It worked until it didn't. I kept losing the notes, or I'd get interrupted again before I finished writing one. Longtime readers might recognize the underlying problem from The Hidden Cost of Context Switching: this is the tool version of that fix.

So I built the version that removes the last piece of friction: reaching for something to write on.

Interrupt Stack is a small Mac menu bar app. One hotkey (⌥⌘Space by default, yours to change in Settings) opens a floating capture panel. Tab through doing, next step, note. Hit Return. Gone in under 10 seconds, no matter what's happening around you. Come back later, click the icon, your top card is waiting: next step front and center.

Everything stays on your Mac. No account, no cloud, no analytics. It stacks cards LIFO if you get interrupted twice, which, if you have kids, you will.

It's built the way I build everything for this list: minimal choices, no red badges, no streaks guilting you into anything. Park it and forget it until you need it back.

Interrupt Stack is live on the Mac App Store this week at launch pricing, $14.99, down from $19.99 once launch week ends.

​Get Interrupt Stack →​

If you want to test the idea before spending anything, run the 3-field method on paper for one day first. You'll know by your first real interruption whether this is a tool you reach for or one more app you forget about. I'm betting on the former.

Minimum viable version, for the days you have nothing left

Skip doing and note. Write the next step only. One line: the very next physical action when you come back. That's the field that saves you. Everything else is a bonus.

One small step, today

Next time anyone interrupts you, before you respond to them, write one line: your next step. Sticky note, phone, whatever's closest. Do that once today and you'll feel exactly what this method is built to protect.

I built Interrupt Stack because I was tired of losing my own train of thought to a good kid with badly timed questions. If that's you too, launch week pricing is live now.

​Interrupt Stack, $14.99 this week →​

Now go find whatever you were doing before you opened this email.

— Matt