Table 2. Interview evidence and... | Emerald Publishing

Table 2.

Interview evidence and contextual data related to temporal rhythms of attention

Participant and excerpt	Focal codes	Related contextual / physiological data	Thematic interpretation
Participant A: “mornings are when my mind feels the most ordered. I come in with a sense of mental clarity. By early afternoon, the mental clutter builds up – emails, decisions, small adjustments – and my attention becomes more brittle”	Morning clarity; afternoon clutter; brittle attention	EEG Calmness higher in morning sessions (08:00–09:00) and lower in early afternoon (14:00–15:00) across home and office contexts	Daily rhythms of composure shaped by cumulative decision load and circadian tendencies
Participant B: “after managing enough high-stakes decisions, my emotional reactivity reduced. I still feel tension, but it doesn’t spike. My internal responses have smoothed out over the years”	Experience-based smoothing; reduced spikes in reactivity	No pronounced spikes in heart rate or calmness across time of day in this case, despite reported tension	Professional experience moderates how diurnal strain manifests physiologically and subjectively
Participant C: “One afternoon at home I had a multi-tool workshop… it was too much. I felt my attention collapse like a wave. Later that week in the office, we held the same workshop, and it felt dramatically more stable”	Afternoon overload; attention collapse; office as stabiliser	Calmness lower in afternoon, particularly in high ICT complexity home sessions; more stable in office for similar tasks	Temporal rhythms interact with spatial and digital conditions to produce sharp drops in attentional stability
Questionnaire pattern: Managers most often marked monday, tuesday and thursday as the most taxing days; daily routines dominated by meetings, electronic communication and work with digital applications	Concentration of workload on certain weekdays; interaction- and tool-heavy routines	Many measurement sessions fall on regular working days within these patterns	Weekly scheduling of cognitively demanding activities amplifies afternoon fatigue and diurnal drift

Participant and excerpt	Focal codes	Related contextual / physiological data	Thematic interpretation
Participant A: “mornings are when my mind feels the most ordered. I come in with a sense of mental clarity. By early afternoon, the mental clutter builds up – emails, decisions, small adjustments – and my attention becomes more brittle”	Morning clarity; afternoon clutter; brittle attention	EEG Calmness higher in morning sessions (08:00–09:00) and lower in early afternoon (14:00–15:00) across home and office contexts	Daily rhythms of composure shaped by cumulative decision load and circadian tendencies
Participant B: “after managing enough high-stakes decisions, my emotional reactivity reduced. I still feel tension, but it doesn’t spike. My internal responses have smoothed out over the years”	Experience-based smoothing; reduced spikes in reactivity	No pronounced spikes in heart rate or calmness across time of day in this case, despite reported tension	Professional experience moderates how diurnal strain manifests physiologically and subjectively
Participant C: “One afternoon at home I had a multi-tool workshop… it was too much. I felt my attention collapse like a wave. Later that week in the office, we held the same workshop, and it felt dramatically more stable”	Afternoon overload; attention collapse; office as stabiliser	Calmness lower in afternoon, particularly in high ICT complexity home sessions; more stable in office for similar tasks	Temporal rhythms interact with spatial and digital conditions to produce sharp drops in attentional stability
Questionnaire pattern: Managers most often marked monday, tuesday and thursday as the most taxing days; daily routines dominated by meetings, electronic communication and work with digital applications	Concentration of workload on certain weekdays; interaction- and tool-heavy routines	Many measurement sessions fall on regular working days within these patterns	Weekly scheduling of cognitively demanding activities amplifies afternoon fatigue and diurnal drift