Context Switching Destroys your Effectiveness

I did an audit recently of every task I do throughout the day and my mental state. The results were horrifying.

What I discovered is, essentially, this:

• I change tasks way too frequently, often not by choice.
• I get mentally fatigued as the day goes on.

It turns out that when I have to totally reframe my mind and spend time jumping into a new task over, and over, and over again, I get tired and less effective.

Chances are good you might be suffering from this, too.

Context switching, also known as the insidious process of mentally hopping from bucket to bucket, is exhausting. It makes you spend time orienting yourself to new tasks way more times in a day than you should, and it’s destructive.

So let’s talk about it. How do you, or I, avoid it? What can we do to mitigate its effects when we can’t avoid it?

After realizing the toll it was taking on my work efficiency and mental health, I went on a deep dive to understand this mysterious beast and hopefully slay it for good.

Describing Context Switching

So what is context switching, exactly? Basically, it’s the act of switching from one knowledge space–context–to another.

Contexts are specific topics, tasks, or processes you’re operating within. Sometimes that can be as broad as “marketing” or as specific as “buying collectible card games.”

Switching between contexts comes in many forms, but most commonly happens when you’re trying to focus on a long-form task and get interrupted by urgent communications, meetings, or other time-sensitive work.

In my own life, it often comes from switching between trying to write procedures and checking out customers, or taking a break from designing our website to offer board game recommendations.

At times it’s just a minor setback, but it can also totally derail work and force us to reacquaint ourselves with certain tasks or knowledge multiple times.

There are some great resources throughout this article that go deeper into the different mechanisms behind context switching, how it works, and why it can affect us so negatively. I highly recommend them all if you like understanding topics deeply.

This article by Atlassian covers context switching’s effect on productivity and includes some easy-to-understand graphics about what goes on behind the scenes when you switch contexts.

But for the purposes of this post, it’s enough to simply know that context switching happens when we have to change our thoughts and/or actions between unrelated topics or ideas.

We’re Pretty Much All Doing It

It’s not just me. Increasingly, knowledge workers are realizing the pain of context switching and the toll it takes on their productivity.

Don’t just take my word for it. Here’s a piece by productivity app Asana about the dangers of context switching. From their article, 56% of employees feel pressure to check notifications immediately, and use up to 9 different apps each day. That’s so many apps.

Additionally, a study from the University of California, Irvine shows that after 20 minutes of interruption, stress and frustration skyrocket.

These metrics paint a bleak picture of how easy it is to be interrupted and, ultimately, be forced to switch contexts. Asana recommends some simple ways to try to mitigate interruption, including putting on Do Not Disturb and trying not to get derailed by notifications as much.

Those methods help, but they don’t address the full picture. The reality of context switching goes much deeper than just avoiding pesky notifications and using a pomodoro timer, although both are solid ideas.

Todoist, an aptly-named todo list app, feels similarly about context switching. They wrote an incredibly in-depth article that’s a great read if you’re looking to really, thoroughly understand a lot of the complicated parts of context switching.

The long and the short of it is that context switching affects everything. It hurts your efficiency because you can’t batch your work as well. It hurts your effectiveness because you get distracted and have a hard time achieving flow. It hurts your mental health, which hurts literally everything else.

You Can’t Avoid Context Switching

In a perfect world, you would finish all your tasks in a specific context before moving on to anything else. You’d get plenty of time for deep work, achieve flow for any and all skill-based tasks, and your days would play out exactly as planned.

In our current fast-paced world, and especially if you’re a business owner, this doesn’t tend to happen. Instead, we switch contexts back and forth, leading to mental fatigue and potentially burnout.

The world doesn’t play by your rules, or keep us from getting distracted.

Sometimes it’s an onslaught of notifications, while other times it’s factors entirely out of your control like construction outside the window or a coworker calling in sick causing you to be responsible for extra load.

Because a lot of the triggers for context switching are built deeply into our lives–phones, email, apps, social obligations, and work expectations—it’s difficult to tune all that out and get to work.

Instead, we have to get creative when managing context switching to avoid burnout. There are a lot of techniques and approaches, all depending on where you work and how you work best.

To set the expectation: context switching isn’t going away. It’s too fundamental to how we work and communicate in the modern age. Instead, our best bet is to manage how much of it we allow into our lives and when.

Keep Tasks Location-Specific

From my own experience, sometimes the solution is to just just, plain and simple, work somewhere else. Sometimes I need to get the administrative work done another time than when I’m managing the front of the store.

When this is possible, it’s a great way to avoid context switching. This happens simply by planning your tasks around possible interventions and changing your location to avoid distractions.

If you have kids at home and need to get work done, for example, try going into the office, to a coworking space, or a local coffee shop.

Changing your location can be a great way to manage contexts–keep what you do in each space limited to the purpose of that space. You can even do this with different rooms in your home.

What ends up happening when you stick to this method is each different physical location in your life becomes its own context. The coffee shop is coding time. Your home office is for email and administrative tasks. Your time at work is for upkeep and management.

You create new contexts, each a form of bucket for specific tasks, that helps you stay focused and minimizes distractions.

Structure Your Work to Focus Better

Routines work for a reason.

If you’re context switching a lot, and notice you often jump between unrelated tasks that span many genres of work, you might need to plan your time better.

For example, when I know I need to get a lot of work done on our website, I intentionally focus 2-3 days of my schedule on digital content. During this time, I focus exclusively on our web presence:

• Write context marketing and edit copywriting.
• Redesign parts of the website.
• Adjust SEO on pre-order items in our web store.
• Conduct user experience testing.

While not all of those are directly parallel in skillset, they all relate to the same context: our web presence. Content marketing is more about writing and SEO. That blends into the SEO adjustments I make elsewhere on the site. While I’m poking around the site, I’ll adjust the design in places where I notice it’s rough.

User experience testing feeds into all of those categories by giving me direct feedback to use when adjusting the site or writing new content.

Now imagine I also shoved social media, procedure writing, and staff evaluations into the mix. Those are wildly different!

If I had to pull my nose out of the website to conduct a performance review, I’d feel scattered. I’d have spent the first half of the day thinking about analytics and marketing, and then have to shift fully into manager mode with a focus on goal-setting and interpersonal communication.

Instead, I put managerial tasks and team projects on their own days. That way, when I get to work I know immediately it’s a day to flex my communication skills and to organize tasks to orient the team.

Find the places in your own life where you can put that idea to work.

Don’t work on marketing on the same days you’re adding new features to your service or fixing bugs. Don’t plan meetings for the same days you’re trying to review todo lists and build a new schedule of priorities.

By clumping related tasks together, you’ll avoid context switching even though you’ll still be doing all the same tasks, from all the different contexts, over the course of your work week.

Worth noting, not everyone works the same way. I highly recommend at least trying my suggestion to batch work, but it is possible you genuinely enjoy interweaving your work and switching between different tasks. If that’s true, then great!

More than anything, managing context switching is about finding the process that works for you and limits your personal stress and burnout.

Delegate to Avoid Switching Focus

Trimming down your tasks is a great way to become more efficient and organized overall. If you have way too much on your plate, you’ll end up context switching no matter what else you try.

That’s why it’s worthwhile to examine your workflow, your tasks, and your responsibilities for a given day, week, or even longer.

In fact, I feel so strongly about time and task management that I wrote an entire article on managing your time better.

Oftentimes, you’ll learn that there are huge chunks of work that are inefficient at best, or an absolute nightmare at worst. Sometimes it’s because you find yourself spending most of your time on a single task each day. Worse is when you don’t need to do that task yourself but have been anyway, causing it to eat away at your productivity.

When you evaluate where you spend your time and energy, it becomes clear what’s getting in the way.

For me, when I dove into my work days, I discovered that the biggest source of context switching ended up being the simple fact I was working behind the counter. This gave employees and customers immediate access to me, and often interrupted me during times of focus.

To fix this, I started working from home more, and rearranged shifts so that I have more help during the day and am thus more able to step away for focused work.

This is where delegation comes into play.

If you have a team, then you’re likely already used to giving tasks to others. This is no different. Find the parts of your work that cause the most distraction and also generate the least value. Remove those from your own plate.

If you work by yourself, find tools and services that automate away inconveniences you face in your daily life or work routine. For instance, use AI to help you brainstorm sales copy you’re not motivated to write so you can minimize time spent doing it. Or, use a ticket tracking service for bug reports and issues with your software.

When you find there’s an entire subset of work you’re doing (say, HR) that you have capital enough to hire someone to do instead, it’s often worth the tradeoff. Do your financial due diligence, but keep in mind that there are benefits to offloading entire sections of work besides just monetary ones.

Your peace of mind will let you run a better company, make smarter decisions, and avoid burnout.

Keep Yourself Accountable

It’s so easy to get distracted, especially when you work on a computer.

There are a million apps that want your attention. Emails. Messages from coworkers and employees. Cold calls. Meetings. The list could go on forever.

Part of managing context switching is to be accountable for your own decisions and the distractions you put in your path.

If you’re managing a team, distractions are an inevitable part of your job. Learn to accept them and find ways to weave your other tasks into your day. After all, being a resource for your team and helping make decisions is most of what you should be doing, anyway.

On the other hand, if you’re an individual contributor or, especially, a business owner, you have to be willing to ruthlessly clear away distractions sometimes.

Maybe that means putting your phone on silent. Maybe it means working from a place where nobody can physically reach you. If you need to download apps that lock down other apps, do it. If you need to put your phone in a box at the other end of your house, that’s fair play too.

At a certain point, you just can’t let things intervene. It’s hard, and the opposite way of how a lot of our notification and ad-driven reality want us to live.

But detoxing from notifications and being willing to look at something and acknowledge it can wait is essential. Even better if you can avoid looking at it in the first place until you’re ready to address it.

Build the discipline to restrict yourself and your context.

Final Words Against Context Switching

Really and truly you should be doing everything you can to minimize context switching. It’s going to burn you out. It’s burnt me out before.

Sometimes you just can’t avoid it. Urgent matters come up.

Go attend your kid’s concert recital, or take them to a birthday party. Go out with your friends. Interrupt your work day to get lunch with an old colleague. In fact, it’s so important you let yourself be carried away by unexpected things.

Just, whenever possible, have ways to address it. Get off work early on the days you have long evening plans. Schedule other meetings and social tasks around your lunch outing.

Context switching should be treated like an angry boss. It should be every bit as frustrating as the worst parts of your worst jobs. In fact, a lot of bad managers force us to switch contexts often, and that ends up being part of why we resent them so much.

We won’t fully escape context switching, and that’s okay. Our brains can handle it. Our phones can handle it. We have apps to mitigate it.

By doing everything we can to minimize it, and by ensuring we give ourselves large periods of time whenever possible to focus, we can maintain our productivity and continue to put out great work and run great companies.