Task switching will ruin your productivity in ways that you never even noticed. It’s very expensive to swift gears from one to another in terms of the brainpower and time it takes to change from one task to another. By the end of the day, you won’t even notice how much you paid for the increase in perceived productivity.
I used to think that the “busier” I was and felt, then more productive I must be. Right? That’s incorrect, false, and wrong. However, these days, I never focus on more than one or two things at a time. Any additional tasks that I take on, I know I will do it in a half hearted way because of the lack of focus.
Doing two tasks in a mediocre way is way worse than finishing one task completely by the end of the day. Done is better than multiple partial completions. Remember to focus on one thing at a time. It’s amazing just how much your results will skyrocket once you do.
For example, I could look for additional side hustle avenues and add to my blog in side hustle activities. However, I refuse to do that and I don’t want to do that. Why? Task switching is expensive to change from the blogging mindset to a Youtube mindset, for example. It takes your brain time and energy to switch from one thing to another.
Think about a simple thing such as reading. Once you get interrupted with a phone call or a text, you lose your train of thought very easily and it takes time to get back into the flow again. That is an expensive price to pay that you get no upside in return for.
What is Task Switching?
Task switching is when you switch from one task to another whether done intentionally, unintentionally, consciously, or unconsciously. This is separate from multitasking which is when you are doing multiple things at once. When your right hand focuses on running the vacuum cleaner and your left hand focuses on cleaning the window.
Examples of switching tasks include when you are working on one Excel report and then your phone distracts you with the ringtone of your boss calling you. You are changing your focus and attention from the work you are doing to another. In this case, you are losing your flow state.
The flow state is the best state to be in. It’s when your body and mind are working almost automatically and in a “flow”. There’s no effort for you to carry out the tasks of the day, your body just does it almost unconsciously. It’s a state that you actively don’t seek out and try to get into.
Task switching gets in the way of that. At face value, it allows you to feel “good” because you feel like you are getting more things done by quickly shifting your attention to something else. After deeper analysis, that isn’t the case.
One way to see how expensive task switching is is to DESTROY that social share button and share this article with your friends! You can experiment and see just how much you lose in brain power by going through the technique. As an added bonus, your friends can be more informed about how damaging it can be to switch between tasks.
A triple win!
Is Task Switching Good?
Simply, task switching is one of the worst things that you can do. It is quite expensive and you’re the one who pays the steep price for it. What do you get in return? Absolutely nothing. You get the perceived misconception that you’re being productive but that is actually false.
So then the question remains, why would you pay a high price for something without getting anything in return? It doesn’t make sense to do so. It’s much like drinking alcohol. Yes, it feels great while you are in a good state but the day after proves that was just an illusion.
You might have a hangover or just downright feel bad for drinking so much alcohol the day before. On top of that, you paid a lot of money to buy the alcohol in the first place. You lose money, time, sanity, and health to drink alcohol. That’s how it’s like when you switch between tasks.
If you’re not convinced, actively work to keep tabs the next time that you switch tasks. Actually notice your mental state of being when you do it. I’m sure you feel a small but significant twinge of mental loss when you change between one thing to another.
It’s tiny so you don’t notice it but it’s still a big enough loss. That’s how bad it can be.
How Long Does Task Switching Take?
According to a University of California Irvine study, task switching takes approximately 23 minutes to regain focus to a completely new task. Imagine switching tasks 3 times in an hour. That means your entire hour would just be spent on regaining focus, let alone work on the task at hand!
That’s a HUGE amount of time to be spending just to get back on track. Furthermore, imagine after getting back on track, you find out that you actually missed something from before and work on what you missed. This is a very common way for people to think that they are being productive.
Think about exactly how much time it would take then, for you to get back to where you were in the first place.
The switching costs related to switching tasks is enormous. This doesn’t even account for the decline in quality of the work you were doing in the first place. It’s difficult to get back to the momentum that you built. The biggest enemy to productivity is interruption.
When you take a long term view with your productivity over a day, week, month, or year, you realize just how damaging your productivity was. In the very short run of a couple of minutes, you may get more things done. In the long run, you make less quality decisions and produce less quality work products.
You may be quickly shifting to another thing, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t take additional time for your mind to adjust to the new environment. Have you ever moved to another country, either for vacation or permanently? If so, you understand that it takes time for you to adjust to the new setting.
The Costs of Task Switching
So now, let’s get into the tangible switching costs of task switching.
1) Time it Takes to Get Back on Track
Once you switch from task A to task B, it takes 23 minutes for you to get into a state of flow. When you switch from task B to task A again, then it takes an additional 23 minutes to get your mind back on track. That’s how expensive task switching is. Almost 46 minutes just to break even.
Do that 3 – 5 times more throughout the day, then that’s almost 2.5 – 4 hours that you lose just to break even! What! On a standard 8 hour work day, almost half of your day is just gone. So instead of truly working 40 – 60 hours per week, you really only worked 20 – 30 hours per week.
You’ll have to make up for those lost hours by putting in more hours to compensate for the work lost. Have you heard of the saying, “don’t put in good money after bad money”? Task switching works similarly in that you are putting in good time to chase after putting in bad time.
2) You Make More Errors
When you lose that state of momentum and the state of flow, you make much more mistakes. Who could blame you? When task switching disrupts your mental state of perfection, there’s no chance you won’t lose productivity by definition. Things don’t matter to you as much as before.
Why? Because well, you think that you are doing the right thing in the first place. Your brain still incorrectly thinks that it is in a state of flow and thinks the effort it puts in is good. Next time, experiment by putting your phone on silent or limiting the number of meetings that you have to take.
Once you experience that, compare that to another typical day where you consistently use your phone throughout the day that ruins your work flow. See just how much it makes a difference when you limit the number of times that you have to switch tasks.
You will make much fewer mistakes.
3) The Time Lost Compounds
The time that you lose due to task switching is, unfortunately, cumulative. Throughout the day, you could lose up to 6 – 10 hours of productivity. Which means almost half your day was gone at the snap of your fingers. The time that you lose adds up to huge amounts by the end of it all.
That’s how much task switching costs. We all know that time is the most valuable commodity you can have. By far. When you lose your most valuable asset to something as silly as just getting back on track, bad things happen. Don’t spend your valuable resources on something that’s not going to get you a return.
Allocate your resources carefully that propels you forward to new heights.
4) Wasted Brainpower and Energy
The momentum and brainpower that you lose from task switching isn’t gone temporarily. It’s gone permanently. You can never get that brainpower and energy back ever again for the rest of your life. In the past, brute force was highly valued. The most advantageous person was the one with the biggest muscles.
These days, the most advantageous person is the one who is mentally the strongest. Therefore, when you waste the mental clarity and brainpower on a day to day basis, you are slowly on the decline. It’s much more difficult to regain your mentality than it is to have it right in the first place.
Not only does your employer suffer as a result of the lost productivity but you suffer as well. In this particular case, the interests of your employer’s and yours is the same. You want to be as productive as possible to get off work early and your employer wants you to be as productive as possible.
In rare situations where both parties’ interests are aligned, it’s best not to squander it.
Instead of Task Switching, do This Instead
So now let’s go over the alternatives to switching between tasks.
1) Focus on One Thing at a Time
Cut out any outside potential distractions that can happen. When you are working on one thing, other things suddenly have a way of making it to your attention. It could be a simple thing such as a text message that takes attention and focus away from you.
Or it could be a minor thing like hearing your door knock because a delivery happened. Whatever it is, recognize when you are being distracted and cut yourself out of distractions. Focus on one thing at a time. If you don’t, you end up completing multiple tasks in a mediocre way.
One excellent job is much better than three mediocre jobs. Don’t try to do too much at once. You can easily drown in opportunity. I have a friend who tried to be good at stock trading. When that failed, he moved on to options trading. Then he moved on to futures trading. Finally, he tried foreign exchange trading until he threw in the towel.
Focus on one thing at a time and actually see it through till the end before giving up.
2) Physically Shut Down Email Notifications
These days, when I work, I shut out all email communications that can reach me while working. I force myself to ignore any emails that can get in the way of my work. It’s done wonders for my mental health and my productivity as well. It’s a seemingly innocent thing. One email that takes about 3 seconds to read the title.
However, it’s an expensive task switching activity to change directions from your work to reading the email, interpreting it, figuring out what you need to do as a result, then responding with a good answer. Email was one of the most wonderful inventions to exist that replaced physical snail mail.
That doesn’t mean that it didn’t come with downsides. Emails add up to you losing many minutes that add up to hours throughout the day. The next upcoming week, consider shutting these lines of communication down. Record and see how it affects your results and productivity.
3) Shut Down Your Phone
When you are wanting to complete a task, the biggest distraction is your phone. It’s looking up social media while you are in the middle of work. Or it could be to play a game for 5 minutes before going back to work. Regardless of what it is, your phone is the biggest culprit to task switching.
When I’m working on a blog post, I leave my phone at another room. I also shut out the text notifications that I get because it is a very distracting and loud notification. Blog posts are not something that I want to take lightly. I really want to put out good content for my readers to learn from.
Therefore, to produce high quality work, I free myself from the nasty distractions that come from my phone. There’s no app checking when I’m writing and producing content. When you’re reading a blog post, you can rest assured that I do it by putting in 100% focus and concentration!
4) Bunch Up Similar Work
Divide and conquer your work. There’s a reason why division of labor and specialization has been so effective in America. The dentist should not focus on scheduling appointments. The CEO should not focus on customer service and responding to customers.
There’s higher value add by bunching up work based on similarities because there’s no changing directions that often. There’s no task switching. For example, let’s say the work is having to analyze data and presenting the data to senior executives.
You could analyze data and write the analysis as you go. However, a much more efficient and productive way is to analyze all of the data first. Then you can write the overall analysis afterwards and divide and conquer the labor. There is high chance that you will make mistakes when you change tasks often.
Not only are you more productive, you are less likely to make mistakes as well.
5) Learn to Let Go
I get the logic behind it. You want to finish everything by the end of the day so you work on a task here and work on another task there in between. However, by the end of the day, you’ll end up with multiple tasks that are 90% finished. A 100% finished task is better than two tasks that are both halfway done.
Finished and done is better than multiple tasks that still have a lot of work left to do. Let go of trying to finish everything. Understand that it’s OK to leave some things unfinished as long as you are still making progress. Don’t try to use task switching because you feel the added stress of having multiple things to complete.
Let go. You always have tomorrow to finish everything. There’s very few things that need to be completed by the end of the day. You always have options and don’t let deadlines rush you. Some deadlines are random and arbitrary things that your boss uses to get you to produce work faster. Don’t be manipulated.
Task Switching is Expensive, Don’t Do It
The switching costs that come with task switching is enormous. What’s even more dangerous is that you don’t even notice that you’re paying the price until way later. You won’t notice it at the end of the day. You may not even notice it by the end of the week. It’s when after a year, the evaluation period comes along is when you’ll notice it.
That’s when your boss can throw down the hammer and say how you didn’t produce as much as your counterparts. That’s when you’ll realize that you spent all this time on nonsense work when you didn’t need to do so. Don’t put yourself in this position. The first step is recognition.
When you switch tasks, you end up having to work later than normal. You work 1 – 3 hours after the day ends because you unnecessarily spent all that time. It’s one thing if you make your company bear the cost. However, it’s another thing when you bear the cost.
You already give up too much for your company, anyway. Companies generally underpay employees and they love underpaying employees. Don’t give up more than the agreed upon time. There’s very little chance that the company is going to give you something in return.
Trust me when I say that I’ve been thoroughly disappointed more times than one year end evaluation. It’s demoralizing. Therefore, you don’t want to give up more than what you’re giving up already through task switching. Your time is too valuable for you to do so.
It’s high time that employees fight back against corporate tyranny.
