AMA #11: Improve Task Switching & Productivity and Brain Fog

If you finish a given activity... and you are headed to something else that requires you to do a new task, and that task requires significant amount of attention and focus, well then you would do very well to allow yourself a period of anywhere from 2 minutes to maybe as long as 10 minutes... where you are not looking at your phone...

The first thing that you really need to understand if you want to get better at task-switching is that you cannot and you should not expect yourself to immediately drop into a narrow trench of focus or a narrow trench of ability for anything that you're not already extremely skilled at or extremely interested in knowing.

One of the best things that we can do to support our ability to task-switch... is to introduce short transition gaps between the activities that we're trying to switch between.

Even the introduction of an arbitrary but very short transition period of, say, 15 seconds where you know that you're introducing 15 seconds of transition and you designate it as transition will allow you to engage in a more efficient and more complete level of task execution on task B if you introduce even a brief transition period.

If you were in kind of a light task or something that didn't have much cognitive demand, well then the transition period can be fairly short—it can be just a couple of minutes. Rather, if you were in a deep trench of attention, you were really engaged in that first task, I suggest giving yourself a couple of minutes or more, maybe as much as 5 to 10 minutes.