Your phone pings. It’s a new Instagram post. You click on it and go there. Check out the picture your friend posted and some comments underneath and then you try to return back to the article that you were writing on your laptop.
5 minutes later you get a text message from a friend asking what you’re up to tonight. You immediately respond back to him. Then once again you try to refocus your mind on the article that’s due today.
A few minutes go by and an alert on your phone tells you that Chick-fil-A is offering a bonus chicken sandwich when you buy one and that the deal is only valid today. You’re hungry. You love Chick-fil-A. You click on the notification and check out the offer and start thinking about heading over to Chick-fil-A in a couple of hours for a quick bite. Then once again you come back to the article which you know you have to get done by end of day today otherwise you’re going to be in trouble with your boss.
Altogether an hour has passed by now and you look at how much you actually got done writing the article. It’s just two short paragraphs.
What the heck just happened?
Where did the time go? You were moving so fast between your phone and your computer back and forth. How come it doesn’t feel like you really accomplished anything?
Moving fast doesn’t necessarily mean you’re getting a lot of stuff done. Moving fast and doing stuff might sometime fool you into thinking that you are multitasking but we all know that’s a myth. You’re just switching from task to task really fast.
Why do we do this?
The reason that we switch from activity to activity and get that feeling that we are moving fast and getting lots done can be blamed on our amygdala. We get that spike of emotional satisfaction with these quick hits of pleasure. Not always good for long-term but definitely feels wonderful for a few minutes. Same can be said for vices like smoking or drugs. People who do it report being satisfied in the moment and craving for it but they know that it’s not good for them long-term.
Many of us go through these types of quick interactions on a daily basis. The hours, days and sometimes weeks just get away from us and then we wonder why can’t we get around to doing the things that really need to get done and really matter to us long-term.
The switching cost
There’s a cost to this “context switching”. It’s kind of like when your car switches gears. In the automatic transmissions these days you can’t even tell but there’s an actual slowdown that happens after each gear is changed.
Once you’re going from one activity to the other activity, your mind has to reset the context. It decelerates from what it was doing and accelerates into a different topic then decelerates from that topic and accelerates into the other topic. All of that costs time but even more importantly it has an energy cost to it as well.
Then what should you do?
If you had turn off your phone or at least put it on do not disturb mode, you would have not seen any of those distracting pings. Would you have missed out on something time sensitive? Usually the possibility of that is very low. Would you have gotten more done with your article that you know is very important and must be done by tonight? The chances are high that yes you would have made measurable progress on your task.
Life is short. If we want to truly accomplish things in life that matter, it is worth it to slow down the chaos in our lives to be able to speed up progress on things that matter.