The most common advice that I've seen, including stemming from academic literature, is: "don't." If you can help it, try to avoid the need to switch contexts altogether.

I suspected as much, but unfortunately that's not really an option for me at the moment. I'm wondering if there are any strategies besides abstinence.

The next best thing is keeping notes of everything that's even slightly important. Ideally, in some app that you can comfortably use without having to think too hard so that using the app won't disrupt your chain of thoughts. If you work on those unrelated pieces of work together all the time, document them all in a single location. If those pieces of work keep changing, document them in different locations but in such a way that you can easily access and change those notes without digging through tons of unrelated data.

That sounds like something that I have been practising for a long time by maintaining my own wiki. It does indeed help. Along with scheduled time for review of the notes. One thing I should add is that I'm pretty much in complete control of my schedule - I can do the various tasks whenever I like, as long as I do them - and I've tried to split up my week in various ways to make the switches easier, but the impact has been somewhat limited. Much of the time it comes down to a bit of FOMO too. I'll set aside 3 days for one of the tasks and on the third day I really find my stride and gain momentum. It's challenging to switch to another task when that happens because it feels like I'm "giving up" my most productive time.

Why not increase the period to, say, 5 days instead of 3?

> because it feels like I'm "giving up" my most productive time That's because you are. :) For regular human brains, switching contexts often and wanting to preserve productivity is akin to drinking while hoping that you'll never get hangover. Stretch the analogy further, keeping notes is like drinking electrolytes and some aspirin in the morning.

> Why not increase the period to, say, 5 days instead of 3? I should clarify. While my schedule is open, I typically "owe" a given number of hours to different tasks per week. If I increased it to 5 days, I wouldn't be able to cover all the tasks. Maybe I could consider a bi-weekly split instead :thinking_face: > For regular human brains, switching contexts often and wanting to preserve productivity is akin to drinking while hoping that you'll never get hangover. I've read that some people are very good at it. Surely, it's something that you can get better at, no?

> I've read that some people are very good at it. AFAIK, neurotypical people aren't good at it, and it's not something that you can just train. Some people will say that, but it's largely an illusion that proper studies dispel. People that are good at proper multitasking or less frequent context switching are probably not neurotypical [citation needed], and it has its own downsides.

lol you're bumming me out, @U2FRKM4TW 😕

Now I'm curious about research in this area. Maybe I'll search around a bit.

It is what it is. :man-shrugging: I know people that are very good at frequent context switching, but given the aforementioned downsides, they would get rid of that ability in a heartbeat if they could.

Just to brainstorm a bit for you: Have you tried splitting it such that every project gets some work every day? This will have the downside of more switching within each day, but it will likely improve continued momentum per project across multiple days. You won't have to start over fresh, having not looked at that project for almost a week.

Context switching is hard, especially when contexts are large and difficult to "load in one's mind". Everyone I've met struggle with it. Neurotypical or not. I agree some neurodivergent people are good at multitasking (I am) but you still don't get the same output quality, and it's still exhausting on the long run. As Eugene said, write everything down. Never trust your brain. Consider anything not written down to be lost or incorrect. Also, anything important becomes cognitive load when not written down. Computers makes things harder IMO because we only multitask with our brain. I mean we multitask on the same chair, in the same room, where we breathe the same air. Whenever I can, I go for a walk between context switches. Smelling flowers, touching rocks, running a little bit. It will rebalances the brain chemistry and "reset" your focus or FOMO. Loading the next context feels easier.

Something I've found helps me recently -- and it's a new feature in Microsoft Edge -- is to create a "workspace" for each project or context and be really disciplined about keeping tabs in the correct workspace. I have Social (which includes this Slack and personal email and some other chat/forum sites and any general/personal stuff I interact with), OSS (which is any and all tabs to do with open source projects that I want to read about or interact with), and Work (which is, well, my job-related stuff, including the work Slack, Jira, BitBucket, etc). The nice thing about workspaces is that they sync across all your machines and you can open and close each one as a single action. You can also invite other people (other Edge users!) into a workspace and then it will sync to their machine too -- bidirectionally: if they open a new tab, it opens on your machine too. This allows for a very explicit context switch -- and keeps all your "work-in-progress" together in that context, saving it automatically, and restoring it whenever you open that workspace. It does "solve" the context-switching issue but it helps with organization and focus. And with that, I'm about to close this workspace (I closed Work at the end of Friday) and open my OSS workspace so I can focus on writing more of my tools.build cookbook on http://clojure-doc.org !

Building on the great comments from @U2DART3HA and @U04V70XH6 above: Part of why the term is "context switching" is because your brain connects tasks to different contexts. If you try to do a task in a different context then you are accustomed to, your performance will decrease. Somewhat inversely, after you connect a context to a task, then simply entering that space will cause a response almost like a Pavlovian reaction, where your brain immediately begins reorganizing in preparation for the possibility of performing the task associated with that context. Seems like if you can change enough variables about the environment, you should be able to trick your brain into responding to it as a new context, giving a similar boost. So for some further brainstorming, here are ideas for simulating a change of environment. I would predict the more of these you can implement, the more effective it will be. And I absolutely suggest using these as inspiration to come up with your own variants. • Distinctly different editor theme for each project. • Different browser themes using similar primary hues to the selected editor themes. • Ditto for desktop themes, if you have titlebars or other frequently visible desktop elements. Change the wallpaper too, if that is usually visible while you work. • RGB keyboard with different colors per project. • Lamp right next to your workspace with a color changing bulb (e.g. Philips Hue) to give the space partially colorized lighting distinct to each project. • Pieces of distinct desktop decoration (e.g. small statues) for each project. Keep them all in a drawer, except the one assigned to the current project, which should be placed prominently and close to your monitor. • Large framed posters or paintings stacked behind the desk that can be quickly swapped to a single nail on the wall behind the monitor. (Probably a bonus here if you use photos or photorealistic paintings of different real environmental spaces, e.g. field, forest, city street, inside of coffee shop, etc.) • etc.

> Distinctly different editor theme for each project. Yes, I do this and can recommend it too!

I like the books Deep work and A world without email by Cal Newport, he has some nice tactics there.