Clean Context Switching
Stick the landing on each time slice of work
You're deep in your work, banging away on your code, your spec, etc. A "meeting has started" notification jumps up on your computer desktop. "Oh shoot, it's already 11am." You click the Join button and you're immediately pulled into the meeting with everyone else. You see that people are still assembling on the call, so you quickly switch back over to your work window and crank out a little more. "It's just while I'm waiting for people to get here," you tell yourself. And then, after everyone arrives and the meeting starts, you turn one ear to that conversation as you try to find a stopping point in your own work. Another five minutes later, you close your work window and turn your attention to the meeting.
Virtual meetings have made this experience the norm. But it's a bad norm. Every single time this happens, you are reinforcing two of the biggest complaints about meetings: they start slow and they take too long. Meetings start slow because people are slow to turn their attention to the meeting itself. Meetings take too long because what begins as five minutes of parallel "wrap-up work" grows over time to ten or fifteen minutes, resulting in more repeating and rehashing in the meeting as participants finally engage in the meeting.
The problem isn't the meeting, it's what happened before the meeting. Or, more precisely, what didn't happen before the meeting. If you had spent five minutes before the meeting getting yourself to a better stopping point on your work, you could have showed up fully present for that meeting from the second it started.
Precisely placed mini wrap-up sessions in your workday will have you end the day feeling on top of all of your work rather than feeling buried under all of it.
Context Switching
For every project that you complete in one sitting, there are at least ten projects that will take multiple sittings to complete. These multiple session projects are the focus of this post.
In Getting Things Done, David Allen captures the goal state perfectly: "If you have established practices for parking still-incomplete items midstream, your focus can shift cleanly from one to the next and back again, with the precision of a martial artist who appears to fight four people at once, but who in reality is simply rapidly shifting attention." (bolding mine) This is a great image of what the potential is when you get this right.
"Parking still-incomplete items midstream" is the muscle we're going to build here. In computer terms, this is called "context switching", and is defined as "the procedure of storing the context or state of a process so that it can be reloaded when required and execution can be resumed from the same point as earlier." What are the important details from this work session that you want to make sure and remind yourself of when you return to this work later? How can you make sure that, when you return, you are able to ramp up as quickly as possible and find your groove more quickly?
"Your focus can shift cleanly" is the bonus side effect of building your "parking" muscle. When you write stuff down, you are giving your brain the green light to forget it. And your brain celebrates this by looking for the next thing to focus on. So as you build your note-taking1 parking muscle, you will be able to observe how much more quickly your brain is all-in on the work you're transitioning to. Clean switch after clean switch will spin your Energy Flywheel2 faster.
Precision Parking
When you are driving a car and you reach your destination, you don't simply get out of the car. There is a standard parking procedure you follow (or your smart car follows for you). You put the car in a parking spot. You shift the car to park. You turn on the parking brake. You turn the car off. You get out of the car, shut the door, and lock the car. The benefit of following this procedure is that it makes it faster for us to start driving again when we return to our car. It becomes muscle memory.
So what is the standard parking procedure for your work? To answer this question, you need to focus on the moment in time when you're resuming this work. When you return to this work later, the first question you're going to ask yourself is, "Where was I?" This will most likely cascade into, "Where did I leave off?" "How far had I gotten?" "What was I stuck on?" Enumerate all these context-checking questions that you typically ask yourself upon returning to a project, and then use that as a script to follow when you're leaving the project.
The technology I use for my own system is OneNote, but the following applies regardless of which tool you use. The important thing is to have a standard "working space" for each project. For my workflow management, I have a structure where each project (project = to-do item that takes longer than one session to complete) is one page in my OneNote notebook. Rather than each project just being a line item in a long to-do list, having a page per item gives me a natural place to put all relevant context for that project. So whenever I turn my attention to a project, I have everything I need in one place to reengage quickly in the project.
Once you have your working space set up, the next thing to do is ensure that each "time slice" you give to a project has a brief ending period where you can capture a summary that the "future you" will thank you for. In my Timebox Everything3 post, I capture the "warning period" approach I use with interval timers to accomplish this:
Final X - the warning period that gives me an opportunity to wrap up what I'm doing to cleanly exit when the time is up. For 15 and 20 minute intervals, it's "Final 2", for 30 and 45, it's "Final 5", for 60 it's "Final 10", and for 90 it's "Final 15".
Whenever I'm working on a project, my timer is running. And whenever I hear "Final X" from my timer app, I move to the top of the working space page and write the following:
Date & time stamp (Ctrl+F in OneNote)
A link to where exactly in the working space I was working ("Copy Link to Paragraph" in OneNote) - as the project gets bigger, its note page will get pretty massive. So give yourself a direct "left off here" pointer so that you don't start your next session by wandering through the notes.
A list of next actions I need to take. For each next action, include my estimate of the time that next action will take (5, 10, 15, 20, or 25 minutes are my only allowed values here … beyond 25 is too large for me to consider a single action).
Then I use the remaining time to get up, move around, and maybe visit the kitchenette or bathroom.
Uplevel U
Now it's time for you to put this into action. Start with a couple of your projects, so that you can (a) ease into this and (b) have the ability to do some A/B testing to compare your new context switching process with your old. For every work session on your project, set an interval timer at the start of your session to make sure you will have the warning bell that you need. And then, when the bell sounds, take action! Remember that you're building a muscle and there will be resistance. It will most likely take you a few times before you treat that bell seriously. Just stick with it.
As you practice this, you will naturally get more precise about the notes you take4. After five or so “parkings” on each of your target projects, you should be able to easily observe the difference in your context switches. At this point, it should be easy to sell yourself on adopting this context switching protocol for the rest of your projects.
Set up the "future you" for success by leaving yourself a love note in the present.