The context-switching tax nobody feels in the moment

Many of us, especially people working in software engineering and PM, struggle with switching between different contexts and apps all day. It's difficult to get yourself up to speed at the beginning of a new day, with everything that happened across all those different facets of your work.

Constant context switching is a pain point for me as well. I don't think the answer is any kind of app or note, but actually changing our workflow, because it's been shown in research. Cal Newport writes about it in Deep Work: it's the actual brain activity during context switching that degrades our ability to be productive, even though it doesn't feel that way in the moment.

The outcome is that we end up spending a lot of effort switching between contexts and still don't deliver results as great as if we'd just stayed on one task for the whole day. Staying on one task for a whole day is a privilege, not realistic for everybody, but in most cases I think we just have this illusion that we cannot avoid the context switch. I'm talking to myself here too.

I'm pretty sure it might be possible to build a to-do list in a way that gives your whole, undivided attention to one task in one day, so you don't have to switch to another task until the next day arrives. I wonder how this could actually be achieved, because I've been struggling with it for years and still haven't found a real solution. The closest I've got is an automation that splits my conversations into folders and saves a note at the end of each conversation I have with AI into that folder. Next time I pick up that task, I can at least ask, "What was that all about, and what's the latest on our progress?"

Kept in the vault, sent to you,
Zhenia