The Art of Getting Things Done.

Context switching between a job, school, two startups and several hobbies.*

• Getting around cognitive overload and decision paralysis so you can get sh*t done.
• Recognizing the importance of uninterrupted blocks of time for work.
• The true cost of multi-tasking and how to avoid it.

When I was in high school I spent my free time making art, working on a magazine, writing, freelancing, designing and occasionally working for the odd startup. On the most part I wrote off a lot of these as passion projects; things that weren’t make or break for my personal wellbeing or my then non-existent career. Years later I still do all these things, but, I’ve grown to be more deliberate about how and what I invest my time in. This forced attitude towards making the most out of my time occasionally corners me into an unproductive rut. Stuck in short cycles of high productivity followed by burnouts and periods of decision paralysis as I figure out the next set of things to repeat the cycle with.

Symptoms included disrupted sleep cycles, breaking exercise regiments and occasionally skipping meals, either because it’s too late to cook or I wake up too late after a long night to afford the time for a healthy breakfast; and you know what they say about your first meal of the day.

Given the recurring nature of this situation I figured there’s no harm in digging into some research on “getting stuff done”. The goal was to learn about things that could help me get more things done, more predictably, with less mental fatigue.

The human brain can only focus on a single task at any given time.

Whenever you’re working on more than one thing you’re never really doing both those things at once. Most of us have(attempted to) work while watching sports or a TV show. But if you really think about it you’d notice that you’re never really doing two things at the same time; instead you’re just constantly switching between them, breaking your concentration each time.

This, and other types of context switching takes a toll on your cognition — if you’re a programmer; switching between two codebases means offloading the current state of the project, things like variables and scopes at hand, and then loading up a different state for the next thing. There’s a cost in time and mental fatigue associated with switching between two tasks.

The more you go back and forth between tasks, the higher the total switching cost and fatigue associated with it. More fatigue equals lower levels of productivity, which means every task after takes longer to complete. Research has shown people can loose as much as 40% of their productivity from task switching.

Without proper planning you’re aimlessly juggling multiple tasks more than you need to. Sooner or later you’d be burnt-out or stuck in a state of decision paralysis; a state of fatigue where you’re spending all your time trying to figure out what to do and usually end up doing nothing.

So how would you avoid all this? After looking into the topic, I found a short process that’s been working particularly well for me over the last few weeks. It’s got a few obvious flaws; but it does get the job done:

1. Create a list. You’re not allowed to add to it later.
2. Prioritize the items in the list. You’re not allowed to amend it after.
3. Get rid of any distractions.
4. Work your way down the list from highest priority to lowest, checking off only one task at a time.
5. Take a break.

Once you’re done with everything you’re allowed to rinse and repeat with a new list. Usually I create a lite checklist on a daily basis, but sometimes I create one for a few days at a time depending on the complexity of the tasks. This is in no way a fair experiment, but for the last three weeks I’ve found this method helps me achieve a more-than-average level of productivity pretty consistently.

*Marked in blue are the days I specifically used the above prioritization strategy. The y-axis is a 50:50 weighted average of the % of tasks completed from the list in a given work day and my personal “feeling of productivity” that I recorded for each day using an average 10am–5pm hours as a baseline. I realize this doesn’t prove anything other than me getting a bit more work than usual done in a given day. It’s a pretty illustration of a vague personal experiment. But you get my point — the system helps (me) achieve a more-than-average level of productivity, so maybe you should try it too?

Most of us would also agree that multi-tasking is inherently unavoidable and harmless in day-to-day work; a few minutes in lost productivity switching between writing a paper and making a phone call is something most of us can live with. But the fact is, if you’re doing it too often this can have a compounding negative effect on your day, week and general sense of productivity.

In fact, most of us naturally create systems and schedules based around our calendars or check-lists that provide enough structure to avoid a lot of multi-tasking situations. But if you’re anything like me you’d want to try and see what it looks like if you were to optimize that more purposefully. This system of prioritizing and deliberately executing one task at a time has (by far) been one of the most effective ways of getting there.

TL;DR

The human brain can only truly focus on one task at a time. Effective multitasking is less about doing several things at the same time and more about figuring out the best strategy to get those things done one at a time and deliberately executing till it’s all done.

If you found this useful follow me around on twitter — @ujzeee. 👋