PhronesisChronic task-switching is a behavioral pattern in which an agent repeatedly interrupts one incomplete task to begin another, never reaching closure on any individual item. The pattern is phenomenologically familiar—perpetual busyness with low completion rates—and clinically significant, appearing across contexts of ADHD, digital distraction, high-workload environments, and self-regulatory failure.
We apply the Displacement Framework to characterize chronic task-switching as a wrong attractor: a self-reinforcing state from which the system does not naturally escape despite generating sustained costs. We define the depth-foreclosure basin as the attractor landscape geometry that prevents any single task from accumulating the depth required for genuine completion. Nine formal propositions govern the structural dynamics of this attractor: its formation, its self-reinforcing switch-cost loop, its perpetual-novelty-seeking mechanism, and the conditions under which escape becomes possible.
We distinguish chronic task-switching from adaptive multitasking and from necessary context-switching, locating the pathological case in the function of switching as completion avoidance. We close with an analysis of return dynamics: the conditions, friction costs, and phase transitions required to restore calibrated sequential focus as the operative ground state.