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“NOW what?”

Strategies for

Context Switching

K. Adam White • @kadamwhite�linkedin.com/in/kadamwhite

WordCamp Montclair, June 2023

Client Logos:

Only use this layout if no vector version for the client is available.

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Multitasking

is a myth

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Activity A�↓↑↓↑↓↑↓↑↓↑↓↑

Activity B

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Context�Switching

is only what we call the�process when it feels disruptive

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Being “bad at

context switching”� Excuse

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is an

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The Process

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Priority�Selection

Cara Borenstein, LeadDev Blog, https://leaddev.com/process/context-switching-strategies-preserve-your-focus

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Everything comes back to goals and priority, doesn't it? A change in context ideally means we are reprioritizing, following a new path towards our goal. For example, right now it is less important to write new code than to help our client understand how to test something staged for release. Or, my colleague is stuck, I need to help them rubber duck more than I need to keep working through this list of build errors.

This is the first place things can go wrong: if we don't fully buy in to the priority of our new task—if we feel this new path is leading us off-course—we're in trouble.

We've all had that meeting we don't want to be in, where we try to multitask. We're on a deadline, refused to close our text editor, barely pay attention, and disrespect our colleague's time. And in exchange for what? An hour of less-productive coding. "When you don’t have confidence that the task at hand is a good use of your time, it’s difficult to get in flow," and we get distracted more easily. It's a lose-lose situation.

I should admit right here that I don't have a solution to "too many meetings," unfortunately, although we'll talk more about prioritization in a bit. First, let's define the second step.

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Task�Adaptation

Cara Borenstein, LeadDev Blog, https://leaddev.com/process/context-switching-strategies-preserve-your-focus

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In our example, let's try again and imagine that we accept that our meeting is the most important thing. Yes, we have in-progress code, but our colleagues need our input and neither of these tasks can totally drop. We're going to give them our time fully, but also try not to lose our progress.

This time, we commit our work-in-progress code locally. "WIP: trying to extract post type generation into new module." Brain-dump a couple lines of text into the commit message explaining to yourself what you were working on. Set a Slack reminder to ping a west-coast colleague once they sign on for the day to help you with an error you don't understand, then close your editor, fire up a blank notes dock, and click the Zoom link.

All that takes time, but by putting a pin in what we were doing before, we free ourselves to invest our brain more fully in the next task. We alter our tools, processes, and mentality to fix the new context.

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When context switching feels bad,�something has gone wrong with our

Priority Selection

or our

Task Adaptation

Cara Borenstein, LeadDev Blog, https://leaddev.com/process/context-switching-strategies-preserve-your-focus

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Prioritization

Strategies

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😬

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Priority Diagnostics

What can you delegate?
What could you change to enable you to delegate more?
What should you be working on?�
What feels urgent? Is it, really?
What happens if you don’t do it?�
What delivers the most business value?
What will leave me the most satisfied on Friday afternoon?

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I've seen four or five talks now that suggest going Marie Kondo on your task list periodically. Write down all the things you want or have been asked to do, then mindfully let yourself let go of the ones that no longer match your team's situation or needs.

Harter proposes a series of diagnostic questions you can ask yourself to evaluate tasks. Some of them combat inertia:

What can you delegate?
What can you change to enable you to delegate more?
What should you be working on?

Open-source corrolary: If you're building software, what exists already that would partially solve your problem?

while others combat decibels:

What feels urgent? Is it really?
What happens if you don't do it? (If you can't answer that, it's probably not vital)

and others confirm your tasks are aligned with your company's vision, or keep you engaged and happy in your work:

Which tasks will deliver the most client value?
Which tasks would leave me feeling really personally satisfied at the end of the week?

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DELEGATE

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Priority Queues

Wapuus by Sue Lockwood ( @deathbearbrown )

TODO lists

Krys Flores, Say No to Burnout, https://leaddev.com/new-york/staffplus/video/2023/say-no-burnout-and-stand-yourself

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Task D NEW!

Task A

Task R

~~~~~~~~~

Task C

Task E NEW!

Task B

…task ∞

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DELEGATE

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“A shorter list is

one you can

actually get done”

Krys Flores, Say No to Burnout, https://leaddev.com/new-york/staffplus/video/2023/say-no-burnout-and-stand-yourself

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Task Batching

Once you've pruned your priority queue, take a step back and think about what's left above the waterline. How do we optimally work through those tasks to minimize our switching costs? Particularly if you're stretched across multiple projects or accounts, look for opportunities to batch your tasks together based on the type of work or communication they require.

Studies show that psychological context switching penalties are worst when we transition between dissimilar or unfamiliar tasks. If you need to give a series of code reviews, for example, you'll probably get through them fastest if you do them together as a group, one after the other. Some of us try to consolidate all our meetings into either the morning or the afternoon, to ensure we have unbroken time for coding during the other half of the day.

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Optimize towards

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A similar thing plays out in tickets. The more specific a ticket, the easier it is for us to start working on it, and know when we're done. We did a squad workshop recently where we brainstormed attributes of a good ticket, and are working together to try to raise ticket quality across all our team's projects.

The best tickets have a clear desired outcome, and cross-link to prior work or prior art. When we're estimating tickets we aim to update the ticket description with a summary of the assumptions we made when estimating, so that we can capture why some tickets get done faster or slower than expected.

We like to push PRs early, as soon as we have any code to show, to give us a space to discuss the solution with our team. We leave comments on the issue or PR thread as we push code, noting what's done, what's ready to test, and what's yet TODO. All of this communication adds up to provide a clear picture of what's happening and why, which aids our own productivity and can also maintain your product owner's or client's confidence that your work is solving the right problems.

If you've ever been deeply involved in an open source project, you may have a particularly keen instinct for what makes a good ticket. So much open source work is volunteer-driven, and maintainers can't always schedule in time to tackle things immediately. If we don't leave a very clear record of what's wrong or what we expected to happen, it may be difficult or impossible for a maintainer to address an issue once they finally get to the ticket.

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Clear Commits,

Commented Code

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Attention Residue

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Zeigarnik

Effect

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The psychology term for this is the Zeigarnik Effect. Our brains hang on to unfinished tasks, whether we want to or not. With code in particular we're chipping away at architectural problems long after we've stepped away from the computers, sometimes to the annoyance of family or friends. That's why those "eureka!" moments in the shower are possible: the task's been in the back of your head the whole time.

The flip of this is that once something is considered "done" or stable then we can safely forget it. A status dump, those work-in-progress notes I keep mentioning, is the best way to solve this problem. Documenting where we got to helps us feel like we can let go of the task, and make space for the next.

I had an old colleague once claim he solved a bug in a dream. At the time I was in awe, but these days I feel sorry that he hadn't been able to let go of work problems overnight. We sleep better when we feel like we left things in good order.

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Standardization

One final way to reduce friction and maximize momentum that Cara Borenstein touches on in her article is to use a familiar and comfortable toolset, even when transitioning between different types of work.

We don't all have control over our software — I'm looking at you, Microsoft Teams — but if we're using a text editor, issue tracker, code repository, and meeting app that we're familiar with, we'll lose less time over the course of a day than if we have to juggle different unfamiliar programs.

I really feel for our PMs who need to learn how to administer projects in JIRA, and Asana, and ZenHub, and vanilla GitHub projects... Just working on one single GitLab project recently made me really appreciate the familiarity consistency of GitHub's interface and code review system, even if GitLab may do specific things in a nice way.

And don't get me started on having to switch laptop to work on something else. That's a real momentum killer.

As with all papercuts, tooling inconsistencies may be hard to notice. They add up over time all the same.

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Emergency

Response

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We're not always in control of our top priority. Raise your hand if you've ever been the first responder when a fatal error happened to a large client, in production. Those "drop everything" moments do happen, and even though WordPress websites almost never have life-or-death consequences, we can learn a lot from how emergency responders operate.

Emergency responders train hard so that they can fall back on practiced behavior and approach dangerous situations with the proper care. It's not the same, but everything we've discussed (from regularly pruning your priority queue to leaving clean code comments and documenting where we got to on incomplete tasks) is a habit you can build. Once we've built that "muscle memory", we're more likely to keep following those habits even in a stressful situation. We want the behavior that lets us work most efficiently to be as automatic and practiced as possible.

If we've been documenting our tasks as we go, there's less we leave incomplete when we realize production is broken and drop everything. If we've kept our priority queue realistic, there's less that will fall off if we have to add a critical item to the top of the queue. If we're used to delegating, it's easier for us to describe what needs to be done and hand off some of our work to make room for the new tasks.

And if we treat context switching as a skill we can improve over time, we will gradually get better at it, and we'll be able to fall back on all those habits we've built up, when we need them.

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Review: Priority

We cannot do everything. Prioritize and communicate.
Don’t assume priorities stay consistent.
Understand why some tasks feel important, but aren’t.
Delegate what and when you can.

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Review: Transition

Find the racing line — batch similar tasks.
Write notes, set reminders. Keep tickets updated.
Avoid attention residue — let it go.
Standardize your tools.
Bonus: Decisions & notes with a URL are more findable.

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Ask for Help

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Review: Self-Care

Learn to recognize burnout.
Protect your work-life balance.
Respect your own work habits.
If you are still overloaded, ask for help.

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Context Switching well

is a skill that can be learned

Don’t let it remain an excuse to ignore underlying process or priority issues

that are hurting your work & happiness

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Quotes, Citations, References, Thanks:

Context Switching Strategies�by Cara Borenstein, @cara_jacqueline

Say No to Burnout�by Krys Flores, @KFloTechYo

Strategies for focusing on the most important thing�by Ryan Harter, @harterrt

Human Multitasking, the Zeigarnik Effect, and Parkinson’s Law on Wikipedia

The racing line on drivingfast.net, and Drive to Survive on Netflix

And Human Made’s Jenny Wong-Gibbs, Joeleen Kennedy, Miguel Axcar, Pamela Ribeiro, Matthew Haines-Young, Shipra Sood, Robert O'Rourke, and Than Taintor, among others!

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DELEGATE

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Thank You!

Gratitude to Timothy Jacobs,�Ryan McCue, John Blackbourn,�Jonny Harris,

and Jenny Wong-Gibbs�for insights & �technical review

Slides: bit.ly/wcmontclair-switching

Me: K. Adam White

Us: humanmade.com

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