Context Switching - Control the Switch or Suffer the Consequences

Your phone pings. It’s a new Instagram post. You click on it to quickly check it out. It's a picture your friend posted from her trip to London. You then return back to the report you were working on that's due later today.

5 minutes later you get a Microsoft Teams message from your colleague asking clarification on an issue he is dealing with. You immediately respond back to him. Once again you try to refocus your mind on the Very important report you were working on.

A few minutes go by and you remember that you haven't checked your email in a while. So you bring up Outlook and see a company announcement that was sent this morning regarding timesheets being due by end of week. So you go to your calendar to see where you can block out some time to work on the timesheet. Then again you turn your attention back to the report.?

Altogether an hour has passed now and you look at how much you actually got done writing the report. It’s just two short paragraphs. Not nearly a tenth of the length it needs to be.

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What the Heck Just Happened?

Where did the time go? You were moving so fast between your phone, your computer and within each application - back and forth. You felt like a multi-tasking hero when doing it. But now you have less energy, less motivation and less time....

And how come it doesn’t feel like you really accomplished anything…?

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The Myth of Multitasking

Moving fast doesn’t necessarily mean you’re getting a lot of stuff done.

Moving fast and doing stuff fools us into thinking that we are multitasking, but we all know that’s a myth. You’re just switching from task to task really fast.?

Many of us go through these types of quick interactions on a daily basis. The hours, days and sometimes weeks just get away from us and then we wonder why can’t we get around to doing the things that really need to get done and really matter to us long-term.?

The Switching Cost

There’s a cost to Context Switching.

It’s kind of like when your car switches gears. In the automatic transmissions these days you can’t even tell, but there’s an actual slowdown that happens after each gear is changed.?

Once you’re going from one activity to the other activity, your mind has to reset the context. It decelerates from what it was doing and accelerates into a different topic then decelerates from that topic and accelerates into the other topic. All of that switching costs time, but even more importantly, it has an energy cost associated to it as well.

I strongly believe in trying to minimize wasteful context switching as much as possible. In fact, our company VisualSP is built upon this concept to try to help employees of companies around the world get their tasks done without having to switch context to get help, information and training they need to do their job.

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The Positive Side of Context Switching

There is a positive side to context switching as well. You can use it to your advantage with intentional context switching.

For example, let's say that extremely important report that you are working on requires deep thought. You have blocked out the time and turned off all notifications and have dove deep into working on the report for one hour straight.

After an hour, an alarm you had set goes off telling you it's time for a break. In that break for about 10 minutes, you go for a walk outside or read a few pages of a fictional book or play some quick sport or maybe even take a quick nap… whatever it is, you are giving your brain some much needed rest & pause for a few minutes before diving back into working on the report. This is intentional context switching and has proven to be extremely beneficial to your productivity.

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Life is short. If we want to truly accomplish Big things in life that matter, IMO it is worth it to slow down the chaos to be able to speed up progress on things that matter. I'm still learning and trying to get better at it myself.

Below is a short video I had made to talk about this concept. Hope it helps. Good luck to us all!?