Context-Switching killing your productivity?6 min read

Recently lot of my dev team folks were complaining below

• I’m unable to concentrate on my focus time.
• I feel like I’m in meetings most of the time.
• Most of the days, I felt like I haven’t coded much.
• I feel like I haven’t achieved what I planned for the day.

The primary reason is couple of meetings which got added into the developers calendar and all of sudden, everyone started feeling the above things. Actually this got sorted out by having with a small discussion with meeting organiser and below action items were taken.

• Clear any recurring meeting which are not adding any value to the developer.
• Does the newly added recurring meeting add any value? No, clear it. Yes, lets work out a better time which works out for all folks.
• After some discussion, everyone agreed to have some recurring meeting on the Whack-a-meet day(day when most of the meeting happen, 80% folks won’t able to code on this day since they will be preparing for sprint review, driving retro and what not etc). So we used this meeting day to our use case, moved new meeting to this day and it worked out for now (I hope so, lets wait for few more weeks?)
• Dev folks started blocking some focus time for themselves apart from the Whack-a-Meet day.

That’s all, we did and dev folks are back on the track

Next question that popped up in my head, Wait, can everyone follow this schedule? Certainly No. EM, PM, C-suite executives are going to have lot more meeting and responsibilities than dev folks, how do they handle?

After taking a step back and looking at the situation, I was like everyone was in and out of meeting which means they are working, then the meeting comes into picture, they goto the meeting, came out burned or exhausted from meeting and they can’t literally get back on the track without spending some more time where they left off !! This seems likes an symptom of context-switching

There are so many productivity killers in our industry and one of the worst productivity killers is context-switching. Many times we are interrupted or distracted by a certain thing like we lose focus, notification distraction, adhoc meetings etc. I’m just trying to figure out the strategies here especially for developer, EM, PM.

Developer productivity strategies

As a developer, we need to have atleast 4-6 hours of focused work and below are some of the habits which I have been trying to pick up. (still on the learning curve)

Set achievable goals: Consider what goals you aim to achieve along the way, prioritizing the top three tasks you wish to accomplish during that timeframe. Rather than stating, I will complete this development story, focus on breaking down the story into achievable steps: understanding the logic, coding the logic, and committing the work into the repository.

Focusing on focus time: Focus time is one of the most and best efficient way to get some work done for the day. Focus time is not about just blocking the time in calendar, find ways to achieve something in that focus time, checking mails, notifications, etc. No, that is not the focus time.(atleast for me). Focus time is about achieving the goals which you set in the above point and the above point is v.v.v.very tightly coupled with the focus time.

I used to remember this Donald Hebb phrase Neurons that fire together wire together which means particularly in the context of learning and memory formation. It suggests that when two neurons (nerve cells) are repeatedly activated at the same time, the connection between them strengthens, leading to more efficient communication.

In our case, these two(goals & focus time) have to be fire together and it will wire together, so that it can lead to more efficient outcome. So working on goals during focused time strengthens your path to achieving the goal and it wires your brain for efficient productivity.

Handling on-the-fly request: At times, people may approach you with unplanned requests, seeking clarification, addressing tech debts, and more. Of course, we should be available for them when they genuinely need assistance! If you can be of any assistance, then you should be !!

But if you’re not planning these on-the-fly request, then you will gradually start seeing contact-switching killer is making a come-back.

There are many ways to handle it, but I frequently use the following strategy:

1. Have a focus time before others start coming to you with requests, preferably in the morning.
2. In between, you can carry out other tasks that can be done alongside these requests: supporting community members needing help, reviewing PRs, learning, or even blogging.
3. Have another focus time somewhere in the evening.

It’s literally up to people how they want to execute these steps, depending on what works best for them and it totally depends on your day-to-day-schedule.

These strategies may not be applicable every day. Depending on your daily schedule, you’ll need to prepare and adjust these tasks beforehand, organizing and shuffling them according to your priorities.

Leader’s productivity strategies:

As a leader, you’ll naturally have numerous calls, responsibilities, strategies, and the management of multiple teams/projects on a daily basis. Below are a few strategies I’ve learned from my experience while working with leaders.

Capturing/Writing notes: One of my ex-ex-manger used to keep on discussing things and at the same time, his keyboard will be on fire(he keep typing it so hard). Out of curiosity, I asked him bluntly Do you want to record the session? and he simply replied Arun, this is one of the habit, I picked up after moving to EM position. He then introduced me to a term Attention residue – is the cognitive cost of switching tasks, which can reduce focus and performance on the new task.

To put it in simple, thoughts from your first meeting/task can pollute your focus on your next meeting/task, so he basically grabs all inputs/feedbacks, so that he can always go back and revise.

No whack-a-meet day: Basically, have a no-meet day and again this is one of the strategy where the mental fatigue can be reduced. So this day could be used to tackle a bigger problem which would require an in-deep research on the some topic, putting it in a docs. Less stress, more achievement towards something big.

Focus time is going to work out for the TLG folks as well but again, it totally depends on how they operate, how much time they can keep for the no-meet in a day etc

That’s all Leave your strategy for tackling the context-switching in the comment section, so that everyone can benefit.