7 questions, ~90 seconds. Based on Sophie Leroy’s attention-residue research.
Right now, how many tasks or projects are genuinely “in progress” — started but not finished or handed off?
Attention residue is the cognitive carry-over that happens when you switch tasks: part of your attention stays stuck on the previous task, measurably lowering your performance on the next one. The concept was defined and demonstrated by Sophie Leroy in 2009.
The Attention Residue Test scores how prone your working habits are to producing it, on a 0–100 scale where higher means more residue. It combines what you do — how and when you switch tasks — with how it feels, whether unfinished work intrudes on your focus.
The score is a weighted average of five sub-dimensions. Leroy's research established the pattern the test looks for: residue is worst when the prior task was left unfinished, worse still when that task is under time pressure, and reduced when you make a concrete plan for finishing it before you switch.
Attention residue is the part of your attention that stays on a task after you have switched away from it. Sophie Leroy (2009) showed that people who switch tasks — especially away from unfinished ones — perform worse on the next task because their thinking is still partly occupied by the last.
The single most effective step, from Leroy's own research, is to write a brief 'ready-to-resume' plan for the unfinished task before you switch: what the next step is and where everything you need is. This removes most of the task's pull on your attention. Keeping fewer tasks open at once also helps.
It is a weighted average of five factors: a five-item scale for how much you feel the previous task lingering, how often you switch mid-task, how often you switch under deadline pressure, how many tasks you keep open at once, and whether you leave yourself a way back in. Higher totals mean more residue.
The Zeigarnik effect (1927) is the tendency for unfinished or interrupted tasks to stay more active in memory than completed ones. It is why a growing list of half-done tasks makes it harder to focus on any single one, and why the test scores your number of open loops.
Your answers are stored only in your browser's local storage, on your device, so you can return to your result. Ikuna collects anonymous usage analytics — that the test was started and completed, and the score band — but not your individual answers and nothing that identifies you.
This tool is made by Ikuna, a focus-intelligence and context manager for macOS. See all free self-assessments.