On the dangers of context switching

The more we switch during the workday, the more time we spend getting back up to speed on the next task. Switching every 40 minutes, for example, means the first 10 to 15 of those minutes go to catching up. The common fixes are to write down the context after every work session, or the exact next action before stopping. The real question is how to do that without turning the onboarding into yet another planning and productivity system.

• A lot here depends on the nature of your work. Mine was a mix of personal projects and cash-flow client work, and since AI makes everything happen faster, I was switching between projects 5 or more times a day.
• The workday started feeling like one continuous onboarding session, with almost no energy left for the actual work. I started getting something close to panic attacks.
• So I decided to split the work by days instead of by tasks. The hard rule is that I cannot work on more than one task per day, and no matter what happens, I don't switch. To be fair, it works for me because most of my work is iterative and hard deadlines are rare.
• My current setup is one Slack channel per project or initiative, with a dedicated bot managing it.
• A Confluence page pinned to the top of each channel shows the current status of the initiative, deliberately kept to a one-page briefing so that I don't spend a lot of time reading it.
• Once I'm up to speed, I talk to the channel's agent, who supports me throughout the work, records the progress, then writes back to the Confluence page and to its own notes folder for whatever extended memory it needs to keep working on the project.

If task switching is this expensive for the human brain, there is truth in trying to minimise the number of switches. Dedicating one day to one task is the obvious way, but maybe there is another option. You could create a smoother context, so that flowing from one task to the next is not a complete reload of your brain. I'm throwing spaghetti at the wall here, and I'm not sure there is a viable way of doing it yet.

Written slowly, sent quickly,
Zhenia