Episode description

Hi friend! Welcome back to another episode! This week we are talking about context switching. If you’re not familiar with what context switching is, it is one of the sneakiest energy drains and time sucks. 

Context switching was originally used in computing to describe the switching of the CPU from one state of a process to another. Today, as it relates to efficiency and energy/time  management you can think of context switching as going from one task to another that requires different type of energy, thinking and state of flow. 

With context switching comes switch cost. There is a cost to switching and changing between different types of tasks. Whether that is time or energy or both.

Examples of context switching that can be costly:

• Switching between household work and business work
• Switching between deep thinking work and action work…writing content vs posting content…writing a presentation vs checking email
• Switching between external and internal facing work…external sales/client calls vs internal calls with a team
• Going from content writing to calls, back and forth
• Doing anything and then getting distracted by something else, like social media

When you switch between one task and another you will naturally expend energy but when you switch from doing one type of task to another you expend more which is why you can be strategic with how you schedule your days to help conserve energy and be more efficient.

Here’s what you can do to help reduce context switching:

1. Look at your schedule and identify all the tasks you’re doing and categorize them by if they’re external or internal, deep work or action work. 
2. Look for stacking opportunities…can you schedule your calls back to back, can you carve out time specifically for deep work like content creating or copywriting.
3. Reduce distractions, this will help you avoid context switching.

That’s all for this week - I’d love it if you came to share what you will be implementing from this week's episode on Instagram @attentionaudit.

Until next week!