Friday, May 20th, 2016
What is the short-term cost of switching contexts while working when your favorite social media app or news site is just one Command-Tab away? Or just one tap on the home screen of your phone? The answer is: virtually nothing.
The long-term cost, however, is significant. And by “long-term” that could just mean by the end of that same day.
From “Read This Story Without Distraction (Can You?)” by Verena von Pfetten:
As much as people would like to believe otherwise, humans have finite neural resources that are depleted every time we switch between tasks, which, especially for those who work online, Ms. Zomorodi said, can happen upward of 400 times a day, according to a 2016 University of California, Irvine study. “That’s why you feel tired at the end of the day,” she said. “You’ve used them all up.”
This article got me thinking about how tired I am at the end of a workday. Mental work is tough, whether it involves solitary work at a computer or paying attention to someone speaking in a meeting. But that didn’t seem to account for all my tiredness. I started to consider whether context-switching was the culprit – each Slack message that interrupts work depletes your resources just a little bit (even with most of my Slack channels muted, there can be quite few messages that get through; and being a completionist, it’s also hard to resist an unread message indicator on a channel; I’ve recently muted even more channels).
One approach to preventing needless context-switching is to increase “friction”. Friction means increasing the cost of switching to something new. For example, if the Slack app is one Command-Tab away, try increasing the friction by minimizing Slack into the Dock (on OS X). This way, even if you accidentally switch into Slack when you didn’t mean to, you won’t get sucked into conversations that might not need your immediate attention, because you would still have to bring Slack back up from its minimized state. This additional step is the friction: it slows you down and allows you more time to restrain yourself from doing something that might not be really essential.
A tool that sort of automates this process is Quitter, which will hide or quit the app that might cause distraction after 10 minutes of inactivity.
Another friction tactic (which I have not tried) is to stipulate that each time you read the news or view social media, you write down in a journal or notes app what you learned from that experience. This quick summarizing helps to solidify any knowledge gained (if this is the case), but you also start to train yourself to think that there is no such thing as a quick glance – each glance will eat up more of your time, making less time for future glances. It’s a way of symbolically representing the real cost of context-switching.
Another approach is to employ “firewalls”. If Twitter is your poison of choice, stay logged out of it on your computer. Better yet, don’t even know the password for your Twitter account so you can’t be tempted to log in. This is one example of a firewall. You can also limit Twitter access to a specific device: just your phone or just your tablet.
And of course, you can combine these strategies: only be logged in to Twitter on your phone and keep your Twitter client in a folder on your second or third home screen. Out of sight, out of mind, and this way you avoid those “quick hits” that you think will be harmless but that slowly erode your self-control over the course of the day (self-control is a muscle).