Yes. Having too many windows open on your Mac actively degrades your focus and productivity, and the mechanism is more insidious than you think.

Those windows stacked behind your active document aren't neutral. They're not just sitting there waiting patiently. Princeton neuroscientists discovered that multiple visual stimuli in your field of view compete for neural representation by mutually suppressing each other's activity throughout your visual cortex.

You didn't work late. You didn't pull an all-nighter. You didn't even have a particularly stressful week. Yet by Friday afternoon, you're mentally spent, unable to focus, irritable, and counting the hours until you can close your laptop. The exhaustion doesn't match the workload.