The ability to change gears with ease is important for nearly every job. But what’s even better—and more elusive?
A gift for minimizing the number of times you need to stop, start, pivot, and pick back up again.
Most of us cycle between getting sh*t done, learning, communicating, collaborating, and connecting throughout any given week. All of that gets exponentially harder to do when we’re context switching—but especially the first two.
In this post, we’ll run through:
We know context switching kills productivity and zaps mental energy. And yet—it’s a really hard habit to break.
Check out 10 of the most popular causes of context switching below. 👇
Ever try making progress on a project in 30-minute increments between meetings? It’s…not great. It’s even less great if you need mental energy to solve a problem, be creative, or test complex code. 🎧
We’ve all seen—and probably been—the person on Zoom who is clearly also responding to an email, reading a text message, or trying to finish up another task. 👀
The average smartphone user gets over 46 notifications a day. The average office worker receives about 121 emails per day. And that doesn’t even factor in the countless messages sent through Slack and Microsoft Teams. When we aren’t being pinged on one app, we’re being pinged on another. 1️⃣
If you’re an in-office worker, chances are good you have another kind of interruption to contend with—and it’s a little harder to ignore. Coworkers with a habit of swinging by your desk unannounced may mean well, but too many impromptu visits can quickly derail your attempts at getting into flow mode. 😤
A lawn mower next door. A ringing doorbell. A noisy pet. A child who needs a snack, a drink, or both. A washer entering its final spin cycle. A jackhammer at a construction site around the corner. A phone conversation carrying across an open floor plan. An impeccably curated soundtrack from next door. There are literally dozens of things competing for our attention at any given moment. 😅
If your calendar doesn’t have any time blocked off for deep work—and if people can grab time with you whenever—it’s tricky to avoid task switching. Dipping in and out not only reduces your ability to concentrate, but also makes it harder to give sustained attention to your most impactful projects. 🙁️
What do you need to minimize FAQs—and maximize focus time? Great documentation. But most documentation is time consuming to make and just as frustrating to follow. And when documentation is hard to find, outdated, or too wordy for words, people who have questions and people who have answers *both* get pulled away from their work. 👎🏿
Research shows people like screen sharing because it’s an effective way to get curated insights from an expert. But those same people admit it’s inefficient and takes them out of the flow of work. The more we share answers through methods that don’t scale, the more we perpetuate a vicious cycle of interruptions. And the less we get done, collectively. 📉
Working between disconnected software systems and point solutions to complete a single task is another form of context switching. If you’re a content marketer and creating a piece of content involves a 309-step process across eight different tools, you’ve got trouble. Harvard Business Review did a study to figure out how much time and energy we waste toggling between applications, and found workers toggled roughly 1,200 times each day—or 9% of our time at work. 😳
We’re big fans of bringing our whole selves to work. Which means that sometimes, we get distracted by personal tasks or problems during the workday. A coworker might be working on a presentation and pausing at 9am to schedule a doctor’s appointment. You might be putting together a monthly report, while worrying about a trip to the dentist, a toddler’s first flight, or a fight with a friend. Life happens while we’re at work. 🧡
Context switching takes a toll.
Here are some stats to make your head spin:
That’s alarming enough, on the surface. But there’s more.
When we get interrupted, we don’t always go straight back to what we’d been doing. Usually the interruption leads to one to two more tasks, which probably means one or two new open tabs, and a higher likelihood of remembering something else we need to do before getting back to our original task.
When we do get back to it, it takes longer to pick up where we left off. Building context to solve a difficult problem can take hours, only to be lost by a poorly timed interruption. That’s the cognitive cost of disruption.
Being bombarded with questions, requests, and notifications isn’t just annoying.
It also compels us to compensate for lost time by working faster, leading to a higher risk of burnout.
According to American psychologist Gerald Weinberg, the more task switching we do, the steeper the productivity tax becomes.
You don’t need to be a math major to know that moving between that many tasks (regularly!) has staggering implications on efficiency.
Context switching doesn’t only mean that it takes longer to get sh*t done. When we stop mid-task to take action on something else, we’re still partially focused on what we were just doing when we circle back to the original. Researchers call this attention residue.
What’s the price of attention residue? Impaired focus. So not only are we slower to execute, but we’re also more likely to make mistakes.
To make fewer mistakes, save mental energy, and increase productivity, we need to stop context switching and start staying in flow.
Before you file that away under “advice I’ve heard 10 times before” or “easier said than done,” here are some practical tips to help you and your team get stuff done with fewer stops and starts.
Spoiler: A lot of it goes back to knowledge and process. How we create it, find it, share it, and use it to our advantage.
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We covered 10 common causes of context switching above. But it’s your typical workday that matters most.
Once you start spotting patterns, you can start coming up with solutions. 💭
If context switching is often driven by a need to connect people with information, you probably need better documentation. But you also need a way to take back time.
We don’t need to tell you that:
With Tango, you can automatically generate how-to guides while you work. Just click through any process, and Tango will turn each step into a beautiful, shareable how-to guide designed to empower your team asynchronously.
See how it works. 👇
Documentation is a great first step to minimize disruptions and maximize time spent doing deep work. But to truly help people help themselves, you need a solution that proactively provides answers in the flow of work.
That means:
✅ Interactive, on-screen walkthroughs to show people exactly where to take action
✅ Callouts to pair procedural knowledge with peer insights and pro tips at the moment of need
✅ More mental energy for more interesting work
And eliminates the need to:
❌ Switch tabs while following instructions for any SaaS tool or website
❌ Search various databases looking for answers
❌ Stop what you’re doing and share your screen
Learning on the job shouldn’t be the hardest part of the job. Your current tech stack may be great for connecting, communicating, and collaborating. But when people need to focus and stay in flow, they need answers in real-time. They need Guidance.
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Many interruptions at work are outside of our control.
But studies show that people interrupt themselves almost as much as they’re interrupted by external sources (44% of the time). 🙄
As tempting as it is, try not to spend half of an open afternoon crossing off small tasks that have been building up and may provide more instant gratification.
You’re probably well aware that it’s smart to group similar topics and tasks together.
But have you given any thought to what it does to your mental energy to:
Forcing your brain to work at different depths on different topics is an especially exhausting kind of context switching. 😵💫
Sometimes, we switch contexts to make sure that the work we’re doing is visible. ✔️
That’s not all bad—but according to a recent study from Loom:
Why is it so hard for people who spend most of the day orchestrating and people who spend most of the day executing to work together?
It’s simple. Their working styles are often directly at odds with each other.
If you’re managing makers, what’s one of the best things you can do? Minimize the number of times you ask them to context switch through the day/week/month. As a close runner-up: understand and appreciate the value of deep work.
If you’re a maker managing up, what can you do to return the favor? Help your boss stack their meetings to minimize context switching between topics. 🫶🏾
Whether you’re a manager, maker, or both, there’s always going to be more work to get done than there are hours in the day.
To cut down on context switching, you may need to say “no” or “not yet” to some—or lots—of things. 🙅♀️
Synchronous communication is important—especially if you’re in connect mode and would benefit from seeing someone face-to-face. 😁
But sharing information asynchronously can go a long way in helping everyone reserve time for getting sh*t done. To take a step in that direction, spend 10 minutes of your next meeting deciding what can and should be shared asynchronously moving forward.
What’s the next best thing to a four-day work week?
A (company or department-wide!) meeting-free day each week. 🎉
According to Asana’s 2022 Anatomy of Work Index, over half of workers feel like they need to respond to notifications immediately.
When what feels urgent starts detracting from what’s important, update your status to show you’re in focus mode. Set the expectation that you’ll respond to notifications when your energy dips and it makes more sense to do shallow work. 🙏🏽
This one’s pretty self-explanatory. If you have 60 seconds, set your savior up for success with a Tango. 💃🏻
Historically, the way information is shared and questions are answered at work lends itself to lots of context switching. Which makes it really hard for teams of all kinds to get into focus mode and get through their to-do lists.
To exacerbate the issue, most knowledge sharing tools, solutions, and strategies take people away from the task at hand. But when you have work to get done and teammates to unblock, there’s a better way.
With Tango, you can capture and share expertise, instantly. Without changing gears. ⚙️
Context switching refers to the process of switching between different tasks or projects throughout the day. It’s often—if not always—disruptive to productivity, as it takes people time to switch gears and refocus on a new task.
Multitasking, on the other hand, refers to the ability to handle multiple tasks or projects simultaneously. This may involve working on different tasks in parallel, or switching between tasks rapidly to accomplish them more efficiently. Multitasking can be a useful skill in the workplace, but it can also lead to reduced focus and attention on each task, potentially leading to mistakes or errors.
We'll never show up
empty-handed (how rude!).
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