Context switching is killing your gains (part 1)
I’m a little bit obsessive about efficiency — about getting things done, hitting goals quickly. I spend a good bit of time in the gym, optimizing. On a good week, I’ll hit the gym five or six times… but I want to get back to other things. So I’m always optimizing, figuring out how I can get a full workout in less time.
One thing that easily burns a lot of time is switching between exercises. I want to finish in under an hour, so I plan every workout. Which machines are close together. How can I minimize setup time between sets. Can I superset two different exercises back-to-back with no rest between them? Can I get my workout done, hit my goals, and finish in less than an hour?
I think a lot of us spend time optimizing our lives — but not our work. Trying to squeeze as much as we can out of our free time. I think we’re putting our effort in the wrong place.
What if we try to optimize our work, so we get more done and have a better life balance? There are so many techniques we can use to work less, and accomplish more.
Email is a great example. It’s one of the most distracting things we use at work — next to, perhaps, Slack or Teams.
If your email is anything like mine, it’s constantly demanding your attention. Most days I’m lucky to see 10 minutes pass without another email, Slack or Teams message popping up. And we’re conditioned to respond right away — but that’s wrong.
Because every time we switch context, open that email or Slack message, we waste a lot of time. Context switching carries a real cost. Going through your day distracted, worrying about every single message that pops up, reading it, shifting your train of thought… it adds up. According to reclaim.ai, “The average professional is interrupted every 5–15 minutes, but thanks to context switching, that can end up costing you 6 hours/day.” And according to a Harvard Business Review study of 137 workers, we lose about 4 hours a week just toggling between applications.
That focus on efficiency that I take the gym? I bring it to work — in ways big and small. One small way is to just stop context switching.
Think about it. All of these methods of communicating are designed to be asynchronous. They are “fire and forget,” designed to go off into the ether and eventually, at some undefined time in the future, come back with a reply. And that’s how I try to use them.
In practical terms, this means:
- I close Slack and Teams when I’m not actively using them.
- I check my email twice, maybe three times a day.
- I tell my coworkers, if it’s urgent, use a synchronous communication tool — in other words, call me.
Yes, if it’s important, call my phone. I may not answer other mediums right away.
Having the right tools helps a lot. I use a Mac, so I’ve got some wonderful notification center controls. For instance, I can tell my Mac not to “ding” or otherwise alert me to Slack or Teams messages. I can turn off email notifications. I can tell my iPhone that during work hours, I only want an alert if it comes from a few important sources.
One of my favorite new tools is the latest version of Spark Desktop, a beautifully simple email client. Here’s a picture of what it looks like during my workday:
By default, Spark suggests I check email at 8:00am and 6:00pm. I’m pretty happy with that schedule, but you can customize it. And if I glance at my email outside of those times I see… a pretty picture, and a reminder that I don’t need to check email right now. So, stay focused, and get things done instead.
I know. It’s heretical. But it works — I get a lot done, in relatively little time.
It gets harder when we scale up though. How do we defend our team from an influx of distractions? Adhoc meetings, poorly organized team ceremonies, rework, and a host of other demands.
One of the most important things to do is create an understanding of value add and non-value add work. In other words, in order to fix the problem we need to understand how bad it is… and then we can focus on solutions and continuous improvement over time.
In part 2 of this article I’ll dig into one of my favorite activities for identifying wasted effort — from context switching, unnecessary work, and other distractions — and how to capture the waste and turn it into hyper-productivity with your team.
Originally published at https://blog.bosslogic.com.
