When it comes to productivity, there is no shortage of tips. I’ve tried many of them (some of which I’ve written about for this publication). But in the end, I’ve largely stuck to a similar practice: I have a to-do list ranked from most important to least important each day.
This system has worked well enough for me. Or so I thought.
The last couple of months, multiple life distractions have resulted in less time flexibility. This meant that I had to learn to be efficient with the time I did have. One of the things I’d noticed is that I tended to get a lot done when I grouped similar tasks together. So, I started ‘task-batching’ on a daily basis.
I was expecting some improvement. But after a week I soon realized that I’d been doing this productivity thing all wrong.
The cost of context-switching
It turns out that the culprit for my yo-yo in productivity was context-switching. As the term implies, it means switching from one type of task to another. The term originated in the world of computing, where the central processing unit (the CPU) stops working on one process; it then stores and saves it so you can return to it later, and then starts working on another. (A practical example of this is constantly toggling between different apps on your phone or laptop.)
In a work setting, context switching can have a high cognitive cost. This is especially true when you’re constantly going back and forth between the two tasks.
Anthony Sali, an assistant professor of psychology at Wake Forest University, explains that when we’re working on a task, we’re engaging an active memory system in our brain. This means we’re less distracted by other things going on.
“When you want to switch from one task to another task, you have to momentarily disengage from the first task,” Sali explains. “When you open yourself up to switching, you’re also more prone to getting distracted by other things.”
The feeling of ‘getting in the zone’
Interestingly, Sali explained that the cost of switching between similar tasks can have higher cognitive costs compared to switching between tasks that don’t use the same brain function.
When I posed the question of why I found task-batching to be more efficient, he said that the difference lies in the fact that I wasn’t trying to multitask. I was doing them one at a time. If I was trying to toggle between editing two different articles (something I have never done and have no intention of doing), that might be a higher cognitive cost than writing an email while listening to a podcast.
However, when I’m doing one similar task after the other, the transition has “less potential” for disrupting me. This is definitely what I’ve experienced.
I’m not someone who finds it easy to get ‘in the zone’ or the flow state. Since I started task-batching though, I’ve gotten pretty close.
During my old to-do list method, I’d usually need to do some ‘transitional’ activity as a break in between tasks. That might mean making a cup of tea, going for a quick walk, or reading a magazine article. Now—I’m not saying this is a bad practice—but those breaks do add up. And if I were honest with myself, there were instances when I probably stretched them just a little too long, particularly when my next task is one that I’d been putting off.
I could think of one key reason why task-batching is so effective: Once I was already ‘in the zone’ for doing a particular activity, doing two to three different tasks that consisted of that activity didn’t require as much of a transitional break.
The power of uninterrupted time
Now, I acknowledge the privilege that I have in being able to do this experiment in the first place: I set my own hours and schedule. While I do have to work around calls and meetings that are often outside of my time zone, I don’t suffer from the one problem that makes the modern corporate worker feel like they have no choice but to engage in context-switching all day—being interrupted by colleagues in person or via instant messages and emails.
Sali says that the key to the downsides of context-switching lies in the dosage. He mentions a lab experiment where participants are able to choose when they can switch between two different tasks. “What you find is that people fall in the middle,” he says.
“They don’t want to just keep doing the same thing forever because they get really bored. So we kind of want to shift our attention to something new after a while.” At the same time, switching between tasks constantly is just “very taxing,” he says, and that creates potential errors and fatigue.
He believes the sweet spot isn’t necessarily to stop context-switching altogether, but to find blocks of uninterrupted hours. He urges managers and employers to consider a policy where they can do that.
Even if that’s just protecting time for employees to be able to do [their work] where they’re not going to get pulled away or get called into some other conversation, he says, “I think that is definitely an actionable thing.”