Switching Costs
Switching Costs
Your productivity isn’t based on the hours in the day.
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When I was younger, I remember being able to switch between tasks amazingly fast. I would jump from product to sales to marketing and back again without missing a beat. Each day was a blur of activities as I jumped between the different parts of my job as a leader.
Now that I’m older, I’m not slower. In fact, I can complete most of those tasks in a fraction of the time it used to take me! Experience leads to efficiency which leads to speed. But I still switch between tasks much more slowly than I used to.
Why?
Because now I know what good looks like.
When I had less experience I thought I was amazing at switching between tasks. In reality, I was doing a mediocre job at all of them. Switching so fast between such a variety of tasks meant that I was never in the right mindset to do my best work. I felt like a superman, but in reality I was just running in place really fast.
Context switching costs are a subtle trap, since it seems like you should be able to jump from one thing to the next immediately. You are good at two things, why can’t you just switch between them at will? As a result, few of us build switching time into our schedules.
To avoid this trap, you need to acknowledge that your mind is a lot like the rest of your body. No one would expect to play their best at any sport without warming up, and your mind needs that as well. To do a task extremely well you need to be immersed in all of the information, experience, skills and decisions required and that doesn’t happen in just moments.
A great example is presentations. Giving a great presentation combines a number of skills, including storytelling, communications and listening. To do it well, you need to prepare! Reviewing your presentation so it’s fresh in your mind, and getting ready to answer questions. You need to practice to do it well, no matter how many times you’ve given that same presentation before. You also can’t give your best presentation if you spend the entire time thinking about something else, so you need time to stop thinking about what you were doing so you can focus on what you need to be doing.
All tasks are like that, even if it’s not obvious on the surface. Sales requires customer empathy, and that requires thinking about everything from the perspective of a specific customer. It’s hard to jump directly from doing something like financial modeling to sales without time to prepare.
Once you realize the hidden cost of context switching, you can start to build it into your schedule. Give yourself thirty minutes before that sales call to prepare and be ready to do well, and give yourself thirty minutes after the sales call to jump back into financial modeling. Or, maybe more than thirty minutes! I’ve found that even at my best, I can rarely switch contexts more than 3 or 4 times a day without compromising on quality. That means that no matter how many hours I work, there’s a limit on how many different types of tasks I can complete.
Can you reduce the time required for switching? Sure, you can be very specific about how you box your time. If you can, commit to spending a full day on one context (e.g. sales) and another day on something else (e.g. finances). That way you don’t have to switch costs in a specific day and get more done. Unfortunately, that’s not always possible!
It’s also true that switching costs exist between days. If you are a programmer it can take days to be ready to work on complex parts of a large codebase after taking a break, since you have to review and remember all the moving parts. This is true of many things where you haven’t done them in a long time.
It’s humbling to think about how much time you need for context switching, as it makes the day seem a lot shorter than it might otherwise be. However, there is no use in pretending otherwise! Switching costs are real and the secret is not to avoid them, but to plan for them.
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