Time confetti & context switching, the silent killers of joy and productivity
It’s 9 am and you’ve just started your work day.
You’re on a recurring status update team call on Zoom. You share your bit and, while the meeting continues with other people’s updates, you switch tabs. First, it’s your inbox (bursting with emails received overnight from people working on other time zones/shifts). You quickly deal with 4 emails and delete another 8 newsletters and promotions. You then switch to a document you were working on before logging off yesterday. In the meantime, Slack is pinging with a few new messages, and you quickly peek at them. Right about the time you are beginning to remember where you left off with the document, a colleague in the meeting asks a question and pulls your attention back to the meeting (yes, you’re still in the meeting). You leave the comment you were working on in the doc and one Slack message unfinished, ask the colleague to clarify their question (you didn’t hear much of it, frankly) and address it.
The meeting finishes.
It’s 10 am, you’re tired already. It feels like a whole day has passed since you started work and your brain is “fried”.
Why?
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Later in the day, it’s 8 pm and you sit down to relax and unwind for an hour.
You turn on the TV and hope to relax. You then receive a couple of Instagram notifications about a friend having the best vacation of their lives in Tenerife, which makes your otherwise fine dinner taste a little worse; a few emails, you reply to 1 of them; 4 Slack notifications about things that could absolutely wait until tomorrow; 3 WhatsApp messages, one about work (non-urgent) and 2 from friends, and eventually your alarm goes off letting you know it’s time to prep tomorrow’s lunch and call a family member.
The hour has gone by, and instead of feeling more relaxed or recharged, you feel even more tired.
Why?
Let’s see.
In the year of grace 2021, we have more advanced tools, automations and outsourcing options than ever, and objectively a lot more free time than we had on average 50 years ago (14-hour factory shifts anyone?). Yet workdays and leisure time are both becoming more stressful and fragmented.
We used to enjoy long blocks of time, which sometimes resulted in boredom. And boredom is, in fact, a good thing for your brain (amps up your creativity, task engagement, social connection and job productivity). The same blocks are now interrupted every other minute by notifications on our phones, computers, tablets, watches, rings and other wearables.
Context switching
We think of this as “multi-tasking” and, for a long time, being able to “multitask” was considered a sign of competence. Yet, it turns out, there is no multitasking. There is only ‘context switching’.
The term was originally used in computing (to describe the switching of the CPU from one state of a process to another). In humans, it’s about shifting from one unrelated task to another and the change in our “mental control settings". Also called cognitive flexibility, this ability allows us to navigate daily life in an efficient way (e.g. being able to help your kids with their homework while cooking; or competently answer if someone calls you from work with an urgent question while you are out for a picnic).
But scientists observed that computers struggled when they switched tasks and incurred a context switching cost. The same penalties apply to us, humans.
The issue is that we are generally still thinking about a previous task for a little while once we move on to a different one, a phenomenon psychologists call “attention residue”. When we are doing it too frequently and between too many types of tasks, the result is impaired focus, longer completion times and more errors, according to Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
And just how much are we context switching these days?
When we are performing tasks or watching material on a screen, we rarely get more than 20 minutes of uninterrupted time. One study found most people average only 3 minutes (!) on any given task (and only 2 minutes on a digital tool before moving on).
Source: https://xebia.com/blog
So:
One task at a time = 100% of our productive time available
Switching between two tasks at a time = 40% of our productive time for each and 20% lost to context switching
Switching between three tasks at a time = 20% of our productive time for each and 40% lost to context switching.
The worst news of all?
Most of us these days try to juggle no less than 5 tasks at once. That means we’re losing up to 80% of our productive time each day just to context switching.
Time confetti
Sounds fun, right?
What it describes definitely isn’t.
A term originally coined by Brigid Schulte, time confetti is the phenomenon of “fragmenting our leisure time into small, unenjoyable moments, thanks to unproductive multitasking”. Brigid had been convinced she had zero free time. Yet she realised that when combined, all the small bits of free time she had in a day added up to 27 hours a week.
It basically refers to just another type of context switching - and interruptions undermine the quality of your leisure time as much as they impact our productivity at work.
I recently stumbled upon this chart:
Source here.
While some of these are shocking (e.g. while in labor), the ones most people picked (on the weekend, during a vacation) are very much part of the “new normal”. Time confetti causes us to enjoy our free time less, as well as believe we have less of it. Several studies showed that bounded intervals of time (e.g., an hour before a scheduled activity) feel shorter than unbounded intervals of time (e.g., an hour with nothing scheduled subsequently). We perform fewer tasks and are less likely to engage in relatively extended (though feasible) tasks during time we’re restricted or interrupted.
And here’s something even more surprising.
Ashley Whillans, who spends all her time researching how people navigate trade-offs between time and money, shows that when we feel busy, we start taking on more tasks. Anxiety causes us to, for example, take on more shifts at work and obsessively run errands. Stress spurs busyness, which creates stress, which spurs busyness.
As one character in Overwhelmed: Work, Love, And Play When No One Has The Time said, time turns into a “rabid lunatic” running naked and screaming as your life flies past you.
Whenever we try to complete more than one activity at the same time (be it work, leisure or combined), we end up not enjoying nor performing well at either. And, when it comes to free time, if we never allow ourselves to truly disconnect, unwind, recharge, we end up feeling chronically depleted and on edge.
Ok, Lavinia, I get it, time confetti and context switching really are the silent killers of joy and productivity. But how can I begin to minimize them?
Fear not, I’m diving deep into this in my next article.
