Context switching has a cost, and to reduce it, we should stay on a task for some minimum length of time, or until it’s done.
But, what is a task?
Any activity involves many steps, or subtasks. And those subtasks may involve many subtasks of their own. When you shift attention from one step to another, you’re doing some kind of context switching, which invariably incurs overhead.
Example: Say you’re on the phone with someone and while they’re talking, you shuffle the papers on your desk to find a piece of information relating to what’s being said. You can shuffle the papers and follow the conversation at the same time, as long as the combination does not overwhelm your working memory. But, if the conversation involves facts and figures, or non-trivial reasoning, even a moment’s distraction may make you lose track of what’s being said.
So, is the shuffling of papers part of the task at hand or part of a separate task? Or a task in its own right?
And, what happened to flow? Remember, flow involves focusing attention on the task at hand to the exclusion of all others. But, if every task involves subtasks, even multiple levels of subtasks, how can we focus on a single task for any length of time?
Well, what a task is or isn’t, is not a precise thing.
But, neither is anything else.
What is a hill? At what point on the slope does a hill turn into a valley? And what’s an event? Time doesn’t have boundaries, so how do you decide on the boundaries that define an event?
And so it is with a task. You get to define what it is.
– Should you group similar items together into one task, e.g., pool your phone calls into one group and take care of them back to back?
– Or, should you group related items together, e.g., when doing your taxes, pool any related phone calls together with the paperwork?
It’s a matter of the fit between the items and your state of mind. Group those tasks together that have a common, or shared, context. In other words, when you begin working on a task, do all the other tasks that require the same state of mind, too.
– If you need to gather yourself to make a phone call, once in the mood, take care of a bunch of calls.
– If you need to collect your thoughts on a complex subject – programming, essay, or taxes – then, once you’ve gathered your thoughts, do many of the tasks relating to it.
Getting into the zone to do something takes effort and focus. That’s when working memory has to reach into the recesses of the mind to find and focus on the information it needs – to establish the context.
But once working memory is focused on the task, once the context has been loaded into the registers, switching among the subtasks that use and reuse the same context is rather inexpensive – it’s like tweaking the state of working memory, rather than having to reset it completely, in a context switch.
So, group your tasks with an eye towards working memory,
and make the most of the shared context.
