Reduce your toggling tax

Free up time by switching tasks less often

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning,
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
tip is to free up time for meaningful work by
reducing the time you spend switching between tasks. Today's tip

(00:26):
comes from an article in the Harvard Business Review about
what the authors call the toggling tax, that is the
time and energy that goes to switching between applications. You
probably know what I mean. You're in PowerPoint and realize
you need to look up a statistic, so you go
to the web. Your homepage is The New York Times,

(00:49):
so you quickly scan the latest headlines before searching for
the data you need. A few minutes later, you're back
in PowerPoint working on your presentation. When you get a
team's chat note offication, you switch over and quickly reply
to the message. Then, while you are already interrupted, you
figure you might as well pop into email to see

(01:09):
if there is anything urgent. Finally, you make it back
to PowerPoint. In just a few minutes, you have been
in PowerPoint, the New York Times wherever you got the
data you needed, PowerPoint again, then teams, then email, then
back to PowerPoint, and you probably repeat this sort of
sequence dozens of times per day. The authors of the

(01:34):
articles say this context switching takes a toll for starters,
it can increase stress, but beyond that, every switch takes
some amount of time. The authors use software to measure
how long it took for one hundred and thirty seven
workers across twenty teams to do the next step after toggling,
in other words, to get used to the initial application

(01:56):
again and figure out where they were and what comes next.
They found that it took just over two seconds per
switch to reorient and re engage, and that people switched
contexts almost twelve hundred times per day. That's a total
of almost four hours and a week of toggling tax,
or just shy of about a tenth of a standard

(02:18):
work week. Now, of course, you probably lose more time
than that in distractions, reading headlines, or deleting emails that
you didn't need to receive in the first place, but
the toggling tax alone can be substantial. If you are
trying to get more done at work and spend less
time at work so you've got time to do other things,
it pays to try to reduce your toggling tax. So

(02:42):
how do you do that. If you are managing people,
it would be smart to see what you can do
as a team to limit interruptions and set expectations. Maybe
you agree not to send each other messages for a
few hours during the day unless it is absolutely urgent.
But even if you are just in charge of you,

(03:04):
awareness helps notice when you switch contexts and consider whether
the switch is truly necessary. In some cases, you may
be able to postpone and batch some of your switches.
For instance, if you are working on a report and
need to incorporate content from another source, just put the

(03:26):
content you need in brackets such as number of sites
in twenty twenty four number of sites in twenty fourteen,
and highlight it so you can see it, or you
can use the publishing abbreviation t K for to come
as a placeholder. Then when you go to the app
that will provide the information you need, you can scan
through the document, collect all the information you need at once,

(03:48):
and enter it in the places where it belongs. I
also recommend minimizing apps you don't need and turning off notifications.
Out of sight is out of mind, So if you
don't know you have email, Slack teams or text messages,
you won't be tempted to switch over and process them.

(04:09):
Even if your workplace does expect a quick response, you
can probably be unplugged for at least a half hour
between message checks. That might eliminate a dozen or more toggles.
This time of year, no one needs a reminder that
there are some taxes we have to pay, but the
toggling tax is not one of them. Or if we

(04:31):
do have to switch contexts, at least we have some
control over our toggling tax rate. If you can reduce
your toggling tax by half, you may be able to
free up a couple of hours a week for your
most important work or for doing something besides work. Either
of those sounds like a welcome tax break to me.

(04:53):
In the meantime, this is Laura, Thanks for listening, and
here's to making the most of our our time. Thanks
for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas,
or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura

(05:14):
vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia.
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