Can Context Switching Be Helpful?

Continuous context switching kills productivity. Everybody who has ever worked on more than one project knows that. However, there are several cases when such switching may be helpful. Let us check these situations.

Fixation On The Same Topic

A person may work on the same continuous and tedious task for a long time. He loses critical thinking skills and stops thinking outside the box. So, the person may be stuck in such a situation for a very long time and can not find or develop a solution.

The same issue may occur if a person has some boring activity he has to perform for a long time. The person loses concentration, starts looking for a better or more interesting task, or just procrastinates.

In addition to the issues mentioned above, both these situations decrease motivation and increase the stress level. Context switching is a simple thing a person can use to switch to something else and rest from unpleasant activities.

Resolving Issues

The main issue of context switching is the time needed to do that, and in fact, it has to be done twice. The first time the person switches from task A to task B, and then he returns from B to A.

However, sometimes content switching may be necessary to save even more time than time spent on context switching. There are two main situations when it may be required.

The first situation is when the person has to do something to unblock other team members to continue working on their tasks. If the team consists of three or more team members, such switching is almost always justified.

The second situation is when the switch is required to maintain existing internal or external flows. Usually, flow-related activities have to be extensively planned, so there should be no need for extra content switching. However, many companies using agile methodologies where changes may happen unexpectedly, and the person has to react quickly. If such a reaction may save a significant amount of resources (time, financial, human, etc.), it could be justified.

As we can see, there are just a few situations then context switching makes sense, but they still exist. Ensure you can recognize them to save your and your members time and maintain the project.