Have you ever felt like you worked all day, but didn’t get anything done? If so, I’ve got a term for you: cognitive switching
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, thanks for joining us for Plain English lesson number 367. We’re coming to you from Plain English global headquarters high above the streets of Chicago, Illinois. I’m Jeff; JR is taking care of everything behind the scenes. The full lesson, as always, can be found at PlainEnglish.com/367.
Coming up today: The high cost of cognitive switching. This is when you switch your attention from one task, or one type of task, to another. If you ever think that you spend a lot of time on working activities, but you’re not getting a lot done, then you might be a frequent task switcher. And if that’s true, then you’re losing a lot of time—possibly without knowing it. That’s today’s lesson topic. In the second half, we’ll talk about the English phrasal verb “leave off.” And JR has a song of the week. Let’s get started.
The costs of cognitive switching
Years ago, the word “multitasking” was a hot new concept: busy professionals, especially in emerging knowledge-based fields, could get multiple things done at once. What could be better than that? Take a phone call and update a report. Do some research and respond to emails. Drive to a meeting and participate in a conference call. Watch a training video as you do your normal work.
Today, “multitasking” is a bit of a joke. If you say you’re “multitasking” during a meeting, you’re all but admitting that you’re not paying attention to the meeting. Our brains are just not designed to give our attention to more than one thing at a time . But even if the word multitasking has become a joke, the concept persists in a different way. Multitasking has changed from doing two things at once—which we now agree is largely ineffective—to switching rapidly between tasks during the workday.
Frequently switching, however, is just as bad as trying to do two things at once. That’s because every time you switch your attention from one thing to the next, you lose some productivity and focus. What’s more , you rarely realize how much time and energy you lose when shifting your attention. And the work we do when switching from task to task is more prone to errors.
Why does this happen? Our brains have settings that help us focus on a task; those settings are called “mental control settings.” It’s our brains’ preparation for doing something important. When we switch tasks, we need to establish new mental control settings. Our brains prepare differently for cooking a meal than for, say, analyzing statistical models. Both require mental preparation and focus, but they require different settings.
When we switch tasks, our brains need to establish new control settings. This requires time and energy. We can make this easier on ourselves by taking a short break and warming up to a new task. But what’s surprising is that the previous task’s control settings need to be slowly deactivated. And if you shift too much, and too fast each time, then your brain is constantly fighting against the previous control settings. So as you make a delicious pasta sauce, your mind has to fight the settings it had been using to analyze the p-values of a statistical model. Switch too frequently, and that struggle can drain you of energy and focus.
There are a few other costs to switching. If you get interrupted in the middle of an important task and switch to something else, you need to find your place when you return to the task. We’ve all experienced this when reading: something happens, and you return to the page only to read a few paragraphs over and wonder where you had left off.
If you’re a frequent task-switcher, you also have to decide which task to return to. Let’s say you’re doing some online research and you get interrupted by an e-mail. When you’re done with the email, you have to decide what task to return to. You might have two or three tasks pending—which do you switch back to? That decision-making costs you time and energy, too.
The costs of switching from task to task are small and are often invisible to us. Nobody is standing there with a stopwatch measuring the switching costs. And the costs may only seem like a second or two each time. But when you add up the visible costs and the invisible costs, it can seriously hamper your daily productivity, sometimes by as much as 40 percent. That’s all not to mention the potential to make mistakes.
So if we agree that cognitive switching comes at a cost, what can we do about it? Before I give you advice about minimizing distractions, I will acknowledge some realities about the modern world. There are some interruptions you can’t prevent. The goal is not to stop task switching entirely.
But there are a few things that most people can do, as long as you have some control over your schedule at work. For one thing, you can group your small tasks into a single block of time. This could be scheduling meetings, responding to emails, reaching out to colleagues, sending invoices, organizing your workspace, whatever. Everyone’s job is different. But if you group those small tasks into a single block, you’re less likely to be distracted by them one by one during the day.
Another tip is “batch processing.” Remember that it takes energy and focus to switch from one type of task to another? For example, if you have to do ten math problems and do ten household chores, you should do them in batches: do the ten math problems in a row, and then do the household chores.
The same can be done at work. Group similar tasks together and do them at once. I’ve started doing that at Plain English and it makes a big difference. We produce two lesson sets per week and I’ve arranged the schedule so that I can do all my tasks two at a time , rather than one lesson at a time. There are even some things, such as the video lessons, that I do four at a time. I’d much rather record four videos in a row rather than two in a row, but twice as often. It helps my mind focus and I enjoy it more.
There’s another old productivity hack that can help here, too, and that is the Pomodoro method. Pomodoro is the Italian word for tomato. The method’s creator, Francisco Cirillo, used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer to develop the solution. Here’s how it works. Set a timer for 25 minutes and focus on just one thing until the timer goes off. After each 25-minute session, take a five-minute break. Every three or four of those, take a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes.
The beauty of this is that you’re never longer than 25 minutes away from being able to check your email or respond to instant messages. But if you truly dedicate yourself during those 25 minutes to just one task, you won’t fall victim to inadvertent task-switching.
Of course, the reality of the modern world is that many of our calendars are full of appointments and they’re not perfectly spaced. That’s fine. At the very least, try to schedule some buffer time before and after a meeting to take care of microtasks so you’re less likely to be distracted by them if they go unattended.
Mad multitasking skills
I remember when I was a teenager, I worked at the YMCA. This would be the late 1990s, right in the middle of the multitasking craze. For those of you who don’t have a YMCA, it’s like a community center and a fitness center together. I worked at the front desk at night after school. A lot of people worked there at night as a second job. And I would ask them about their jobs, since I was curious about the grown-up world and we had a lot of down time.
So I asked one of them, what are you really good at? And she said—I’ll never forget this—she said “multitasking.” I was probably only about 17 and even at that young age I knew that was just bogus. Just fluff. I mean I asked her what she’s really good at, and she said multitasking! I guess it didn’t matter what any of the multiple tasks were; she could just do two or more of them at a time.
Learn English the way it’s really spoken
