Context Switching Epidemy
How overwhelming context-swithing can be? My answer to this is that it can be extremely overwhelming. But as many aspects of my professional journey, context-switching is something I personally learned to deal with.
When It First Hit Me
As a former engineer I was used to levarage extream focus in solving technical problems. I would decline meetings that were not related to the urgent challange I needed to address and would spend many hours and days in a flow state going through documentation, writing RFCs or proposals and experimenting technical solutions. My dopamine levels would go high and the feeling of acomplishment once I was able to deliver a solution was something that to this day I still look for every single day at work.
Of course it didn’t stay like this forever. As I became more senior, having more influence, impact and specially when I moved into management I was suddenly being dragged between many different topics that were not even all technical in nature. I started feeling that I was working harder and achieving nothing. I would join a prioritisation meeting, the meeting would end and before I could write a plan to what to do next I was already being dragged into performance reviews and that 5 technical RFCs that needed to be reviewed right now.
This is the recipe for burnout. It’s not sustainable and I learned from it.
First thing I learned, which I’m pretty sure most of you know as well but to me it was new. If everything is urgent of course nothing is urgent and thing’s just won’t get done.
Disclaimer: I won’t go into prioritisation and defining OKRs because I want to discuss this on the personal level and how to deal with this situation individually while you may be reprioritising work and defining proper OKRs on the side.
Get Yourself Out of The Way
Delegate. We all know this but it's easy to forget. Your high levels of context swithing may be a simple evidence that you are just all over the place and in the critical path of every decision of your team or maybe teams. You need to trust your engineers, empower them and provide them with an opportunity to grow and take credit for their work. Allow them to lead projects by themselves, make decisions and learn from their mistakes. You can still act as a mentor and make sure that principals to which your organisation should stand by are clear and properly communicated.
Another aspect of delegating that I find quite amusing and easy to overlook is reducing blast radius. When you delegate what’s in your plate across many different people you can be sure that most of them want to do great work. Even if a few end up failing at the challenge at least now you know exactly where you should focus while a big chunk of the previous work was successfully dealt by other people that can now enjoy recognition for their great contributions.
The Three Stooges Syndrome
Doctor: “Mr. Burns, I’m afraid, you are the sickest man in the United States … but all of your deases are in perfect balance”
Mr. Burns: “So what you're saying is, I'm indestructible.”
Every time I have too many things to do at the same time I remember this Simpsons episode. Mr. Burns has so many deases that they all cancel each other and nothing happens to him, which in his case is a good thing.
But think about this in terms of productivity. If you have too many things to do and you don’t know where to start, well you may just start suffering a strong paralisis. Choose one thing. Sure, easier said then done. What if I start by the wrong one? That is exactly what comes to my mind when I’m in that situation. But I learned that it is better to start by the “wrong” item other than not start at all. You will have less things in front of you by the end of the day, you will have the feeling that you acomplished something and you will be able to have more clarity into what is actually more important.
While I write this it almost seems silly to suggest it. It’s so obvious and everyone knows it, even I do. But it’s not a bad idea to overcommunicate and give a quick reminder that it’s easy for this to go overlooked. Don’t let the impulse of addressing everything at the same time paralise you into not addressing anything.
Cool, what’s next?
I guess I could write about this for many hours exploring every different thing I learned through my persue for extreme productivity. But that would be too much to write and diggest. I’m still learning anyways. But those are the two simplest and the techniques I most use on a daily basis. Everyday I have to delegate something and everyday I have to choose one item to work on that I may not be 100% sure is the one that needs immediate attention. But an informed decision is the best decision you make with the current available information to you. Work with that.
See you in my next post!