The price of too much context switching

Context switching between different tasks is one of the costliest ways to spend your time. But what is context switching, exactly? At best, it's an intentional pivot from one topic or activity to another. At worst (and more commonly), it's distractions that pull your mind away from the task that's in front of you. Most of us know the feeling of how detrimental distractions can be to our producivity, but the University of California, Irvine proved it: they ran a survey that found that after just 20 minutes of repeating interruptions, participants reported significantly higher stress, frustration, workload, effort, and pressure.

What does that mean for your calendar? ‍

In the spirit of reducing context switching in your day, we encourage "theming your time": organizing your calendar in a way that bundles similar activites for efficency. Try spending 15 minutes thinking through all the things you regularly need to do and consider how you could reshuffle them on your calendar to minimize context waste. Think about things like:

• Batching your 1x1's together | Do you have a recurring 30 minute 1x1 that is floating in an otherwise open afternoon? Reschedule it to live next to another recurring meeting so that your open afternoon can be used for longer, focused work.
  
• Consider energy spend and energy drain events | Be thoughtful about scheduling different types of events next to each other. If you have a variety of things you need to do that all drain your energy, consider spreading them out over the week instead of doing them all at once.
  
• Lean on teammates | Do you have other folks on your team that have to do similar tasks as you? Have a discussion to see if there's a way you can take turns focusing on the work to limit distractions over time. A good example here would be if you and a teammate co-manage an inbox that gets questions from employees. Rather than both being in the inbox all day, consider taking shifts so that you each gain some focus time without feeling like you need to keep one eye on the incoming emails.
  
• Use tech to help | If you use Google Calendar, you can use a setting to automatically make meetings 25 minutes and 50 minutes (vs. the more common 30 and 1 hour lengths). Doing so helps build in transition times between meetings.

There's no right or wrong way to theme your time, but being thoughtful about how you're spending it can make a huge impact in your overall productivity.

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