Time confetti & context switching: four ways to fight back
Focusing feels nearly impossible in today’s world and many of us pride ourselves in being skilled “multitaskers”".
The bad news?
“"Multitasking” doesn’t exist.
I previously wrote here about two killers of joy and productivity: context switching and time confetti. Knowing is winning half the battle, but “what do we do about it?”, asked many of those who read that article.
In very few words, the only way to radically improve the negative consequences of excessive context switching and time confetti is to take control of our time and schedule. To be less reactive and more proactive.
Ok, Lavinia, easy to say, but how do I do that?
Here are four things you can start with.
Disclaimer: this is a long article. For TL;DR (too long; didn’t read), skip right to the bite-sized action suggestions.
Compartmentalize your time
The recent transition to work from home, as well as the ability to shop online, video chat with our families, access entertainment from anywhere, etc., at any given time, are all great. But they’ve resulted in us having blurred - if any - boundaries between work and personal life. Do we work from home or do we live at work? Nobody knows anymore. We’re never really truly working, and never really truly relaxing, being fully present with our families, reading, and so on.
The first thing you might want to do to tackle this is to start dedicating specific parts of your day for work, learning, leisure, family time, etc.
This might sound counterintuitive, as one of the aspects people love most about having a more flexible schedule is, for example, being able to pick up their kids from work, spend some time with them, and then go back to work once they’re asleep; or having a jog or a workout in the middle of the work day. But compartmentalizing doesn’t mean being rigid or going back to strict 9-to-5 work hours. It simply means telling your brain and body when to expect to work, relax, engage socially and so on - and committing to it.
When you work, work. When you take a break, be fully on break. When you’re with family and friends, be fully present. Whatever hours of the day you choose to dedicate to either one of those.
Bite-sized action you can take to get started on this:
Look at your to-do or schedule for tomorrow, mentally and digitally or physically mark one or two 90-min intervals for work, and commit to addressing your tasks during those times. Refrain from pursuing all activities unrelated to work during those times (e.g. taking a ‘quick’ catch-up call with a friend, doing laundry, booking trips or tickets online) except for short breaks. Once the time has passed, stop addressing those tasks. We’ll build on this over the next points.
2. Prioritize & time-block
Here’s one thing that sounds quite intuitive, but isn’t true for many of us: your calendar should match your priorities. If your declared priority this week is “producing amazing designs for our next promo campaign” or “working on our project strategy for 2022” but you are addressing email or attending 2-4 mildly relevant Zoom meetings during your most productive time of the day (e.g. morning hours), it’s very likely that your real priority is “team collaboration” or “keeping clients happy” rather than producing amazing designs or working on the strategy.
How does one prioritize?
Prioritizing is a strategic activity, but it doesn’t have to be complex. Most people fail to prioritize not because it’s difficult, but because they don’t, in fact, control their own schedule (for various reasons). One way of doing it is using the Eisenhower matrix I mentioned here.
When you prioritize, you are also more likely to work on the most important things. Recklessly addressing everything that comes your way doesn’t allow you that choice. It’s in fact, a lazy choice - you’re doing a lot of doing, but you’re lazy on the thinking side.
And what’s this time-blocking thing?
In short, time-blocking is a productivity technique where a period of time is divided into segments or blocks for specific tasks or to-dos. It basically integrates the function of a calendar with that of a to-do list.
The core of time-blocking refers to grouping or batching tasks by function or type and ‘blocking’ chunks of focused time to tackle them. The best things about it? 1. it minimizes context switching and allows you to easily enter “flow states”; 2. It pushes you to be a lot more realistic about how long something will take and how many items on your to-do list are actually doable within a given time.
Many people who use time-blocking do full-themed days (e.g. admin day, content creation day, etc.) to minimize context switching even further.
A time-blocked schedule (which I do every day) looks like this for me (below). I plan in advance so I can prioritize meaningful work, not only the “urgency” - or firefighting as I call it- of the day.
Bite-sized action you can take to get started on this:
At the end of your current/next working day, have a look at your to-do list and prioritize using the Eisenhower method. Place things in quadrants (you can easily do it on four post-it notes following the graph above) and decide what are the most important things you’re going to tackle over the next days during your “prime” work time (usually 9 am to 12 pm for most people). Then time-block for those, and if they really are your most important priorities, treat them like a meeting with a consultant you pay 250 USD/h. This entire exercise should only take you 10-15 minutes.
3. Reduce & control distractions
Our current world is a never-ending series of distractions, urgency and interruptions. The average worker in the U.S. gets interrupted 13.7 times per day by digital technologies, like Slack and email, according to this survey (and I expect it’s only gotten worse since). People spend more than three hours a day checking work email and switching back and forth from and to it.
Those of us who work in environments where they experience a lot of interruptions report higher stress, frustration, workload, effort, and pressure.
Conversely, focus is perhaps the most “accessible” competitive advantage you can have these days. In a world of mostly-distracted-individuals, it can set you apart and be your superpower - whatever industry or line of work you’re in.
So, be cheap with the distractions (like meetings, emails, notifications) you allow in your life.
As you can see above in my time-blocked schedule, I set aside realistic time to catch up with emails, Slack and be helpful and responsive to what our teams and clients need, but I limit that to a few slots per day, rather than doing it at all times. Instant communication is like a hot bath - you should go in and out as needed, not sit in it the whole day. This approach allows you to balance availability with productivity and ensures you don’t miss important things while protecting your focused time.
Some go as far as leaving their phones out of the room when working or studying, as it’s been proven that the mere presence of your smartphone reduces your cognitive capacity (crazy, right?).
I also book buffers and breaks, because we know from the planning fallacy that things often take a lot longer than we expect, and we should always give our brains and bodies time to pause and recharge.
Bite-sized action you can take to get started on this:
Revisit your time blocked schedule (discussed in the previous bite-sized action) and add time slots for technology use. Then, switch off notifications for at least 1h today (gasp!). Most phones have settings that allow you to mute entirely most notifications (e.g. Instagram, Facebook) and only see the ones you need (e.g. certain messages, calls) when you choose to look at your phone, rather than getting incessantly “beeped” out of your focus at all times. Try it. It’s scary at first, but you’ll notice a huge difference.
4. Single-task
Now that you’ve dedicated time for work/family/hobbies/being social and committed to keeping those boundaries, you’ve prioritized and time-blocked and started to be cheap with distractions, let’s focus a bit on what happens within those blocks.
Note: everything I’m saying here can easily be applied to personal projects and other types of activities, not only work.
Even if we fully dedicate certain hours to work, and don’t allow distractions and our ‘other’ lives to ‘come in’ during that time, we all have those days when we worked on 8 things but didn’t finish any. Now, the problem is that our brains do very much like “completion”, and we get a dopamine release (= happiness, satisfaction) when we tick something off the list.
This study also clearly showed that if we are interrupted during a task, we perform worse than if we are allowed to complete it first before starting the next one.
Have you heard of the Zeigarnik effect?
It refers to a psychological phenomenon describing the tendency to remember interrupted or incomplete tasks or events more easily than tasks that have been completed. In short, incomplete tasks “stick” with us. The Russian psychologist who coined the term, Bluma Zerigarnik, noticed that waiters were able to remember complex orders with high accuracy while they were processing them. But as soon as the bill was paid, they forgot completely what the orders were. This is, of course, generally a useful thing, as it’s good to keep top of mind what we haven’t yet finished.
The problem is that each incomplete task your brain keeps holding on to takes up some of your attention, makes it more difficult to focus on what’s currently at hand and gives you that “foggy” confused feeling we all hate.
So stop trying to multi-task. Focus on one thing at a time, get it done, and then move to the next. When you single-task, you get things done (which your brain/team/boss/family will thank you for) and of a higher quality.
When you’re done with work time, take an inventory of all the “unfinished” things and account for them in your task management system or planning for the next day, set up reminders, etc. Tell your brain they’re taken care of, and it can relax now. That way you make sure any unfinished tasks stay at work rather than follow you to your family dinner, on vacation, out for a picnic during the weekend, or in your sleep.
Bite-sized action you can take to get started on this:
As we’ve seen in my previous article, we often only get 2 to 3 minutes of uninterrupted time on a task. If that’s how most of your day is currently spent, you’ll need to start small, and exercise your “attention muscle”*.
A simple technique like Pomodoro can be very helpful. You can use this tool to commit to a focused time slot of single-tasking. A typical Pomodoro slot is 25 minutes, but if you’re just starting out, you might want to go to “settings” and shorten that to 10 minutes and then build towards 25 over the next weeks.
*Personal share: evolving from a child with ADHD/hyperactive tendencies, when I first started looking into this, my attention span was 6 to 8 minutes at best. A few years later, I’ve now just spent 2h 38 min of uninterrupted time on this article - and it didn’t feel too hard. I’m telling you this not to brag, but to show you it’s doable for anyone.
4. Work on your time affluence & spend money to buy free time (not the other way around)
Time is money, isn’t it?
I’ll go on a limb here and assume that most of us reading this post live in a capitalist society, or something resembling that. And capitalism teaches us that the only value time has translates into, well… money.
I don’t know about you but I have quite a bit of an issue with that. No, I’m not and don’t want to be a money-making machine.
It sounds like some of the most prestigious scientists in the world agree with me. At Yale, neuroscientists are finding that feeling overwhelmed is actually shrinking our brains - we’re literally a little bit dumber (and less happy) when we’re hustling too much.
A primary cause of lower well-being and increased anxiety and insomnia is time poverty. “Incomes have risen in many countries, potentially exacerbating a new form of poverty: from Germany to Korea to the United States, people with higher incomes report greater time scarcity.”
Amongst other things, feelings of time poverty are caused by how well activities fit together in our mind - which circles right back to time confetti and context switching.
Time affluence could mean simply breathing deeply (which relieves stress and calms down your nervous system) and observing who and what is around you rather than pulling up your phone while waiting in a queue. It could mean taking a walk and listening to the sounds your footsteps make in the snow or ruffling leaves after picking up your kid from kindergarten, rather than furiously buzzing through traffic and incessantly scrolling through Facebook while waiting at the traffic lights. Or spending a morning reading rather than TV-channel zapping, while following some work drama on your ‘other screen’. The whole point is being more deliberate with our free time and carving out a few meaningful, intentional moments every day.
Spending money to buy free time rather than the other way around can take many different shapes and forms. For some of us, that could mean enlisting the help of a VA to take care of admin tasks here and there; hiring one more person in our team that would take off some of the load; looking into a pre-cooked meal delivery or grocery delivery service. It could also mean choosing to not take on a client or a project, especially if we know they’ll be a pain to deal with. It is entirely possible that larger screen TV or latest generation mobile phone we feel we ‘need’ isn’t worth the ‘price’ in time we pay for it.
I am fully aware that many of us might not, at least at times, be fortunate enough to afford making some of these choices. Yet challenging the view that time is only money, even in small ways, is well worth the effort. And, in the process, we might find something we haven’t yet thought of.
Bite-sized action you can take to get started on this:
Think about the last few weeks and pinpoint a moment when you could’ve chosen time affluence over money or hustle. There are quite a few examples in the paragraphs above. Make a mental note of it, and commit to making a different choice the same type of situation comes around.
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This approach to time, but more importantly, energy and attention management, has allowed me to, at times, run 3+ companies and 5+ teams in parallel, serve dozens of clients and projects at one time, while working roughly 40 (highly planned, intentional and focused) hours per week, and being able to spend ample, quality time with family and friends, staying healthy and learning new things. I don’t always get it right (far from it), but it has made a world of difference.
I hope it helps you, too.
I’d love to hear from you if it did, or if you have other frameworks you use that you find helpful.
Have a focused week!
